A Wild Heart
by Unforgettable Green Eyes
Summary: She led a quiet, ordinary life and wanted for nothing more. Until the day she happened upon a wounded stranger in the forest... An original fairy tale. AU. CloudXAeris.
1. Chapter 1

For Gabriela Romero, whose kindness and generosity know no bounds. Without you, this story would've probably been left to sit in the corners of my mind gathering cobwebs and dust forever. Thank you.

_**Update**_ (7/22/2012): Thanks to the amazing and talented Gabriela, I now have a cover picture for my little fanfic! Yes, the cover image you see next to the title was drawn specifically for the story by Gabriela, and although it was not technically meant to be a cover illustration, I got her permission to use it for just that, and I am just all kinds of thrilled and excited and awed that I have such an unbelievably gorgeous picture representing _my_ story (I wonder if this is how real authors feel the very first time they see the illustrations someone else created for their soon-to-be-published book?). Please visit her dA for a good look at it in its untouched, much better quality size to appreciate the true beauty of the picture: gavryll. deviant art art/ Cloris-A-Wild-Heart-316209676 (take out the spaces!). And have a look around at her other work while you're at it. She is truly one gifted artist. Thank you, Gabriela!

* * *

><p><strong>~A Wild Heart~<strong>

**Chapter One**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

**_The heart has its reasons,  
>whereof reason knows nothing.<br>—Pascal_**

In a land far away, where low-rising hills stretched as far as the eye could see, a man could set out on foot in almost any direction and journey for weeks and see nothing else but the hills and valleys until he came at last to where the land met the sea. To the north, the hills were ranged by great black forests, and farther out west within walking distance of a cold, clear stream a small number of farms had cropped up across the countryside in view of the woods that some believed to be as old as the hills themselves. In this part of the world, stories of beings with unearthly talents were alive and well, and the children who grew up there were brought up on such tales, learning them before they could walk and talk.

In one of the farms lived two girls and a boy. The girls had been taken in and raised alongside the boy by his elderly parents when the fever had struck the land, wiping out nearly a third of the tiny population, including both of the girls' fathers and mothers. When the old man and woman passed on, the three children, having already had the running of the farm turned over to them soon after the girls' arrival, opted to stay together and continue to eek out a living on the farm as they had been taught. In this way they lived in relative happiness for several years and were coming of age.

One of the girls was named Aeris and she had the responsibility of caring for the sheep and taking them out to pasture each day. Of her companions, the other girl was the one who saw to the main chores around the farm while the boy had recently joined in the labor of the men hard at work digging wells on neighboring farms, a task that had been on the rise in the last couple of years.

On a warm spring day, Aeris had taken the sheep far out to a field near the old homestead that had belonged to another family before they'd packed up and left for a city on the south coast, and keeping within sight of the flock and Daisy and Lucy, the farm's sheepdogs, was foraging for edible roots and plants that grew out in the wild herself. She'd managed to gather enough turnips to make a salad and found a potato plant from the Thompson family garden when a white four-legged animal came up beside her and made its presence known by bleating loudly right in her ear.

Aeris glanced up from where she was kneeling in the grass and weeds, digging out a nice fat potato with her trowel. To her right, the sun was sinking behind the hills.

"Okay, why not?" she smiled ruefully at the young sheep. Dropping the trowel and last potato into her basket, she brushed the dirt from her dress and shook it out before grabbing her staff and basket, and rising to her feet. "Let's get you to the stream and head on home."

She looked around, spotted the two brown forms amid the mass of white, and slipping the first two fingers of her right hand between her lips, blew hard. Lucy and Daisy got up immediately and began rounding up the sheep.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

On the way home, something strange happened that gave Aeris a reason to believe her life was about to take an unexpected turn. She and the dogs had guided the flock back up north over the hills and onto the familiar dirt road at sundown when she saw a stooped figure struggling with the rope at the old well of an abandoned farm up ahead, a little ways from where the stream burst forth from the woods and went southward, winding and curving with the valleys. The animals needed no further assistance and went straight to the various man-made holes and narrow canals that were found along the stream as she rushed forward to lend a hand.

"Here, ma'am, let me help you with that." Dropping her staff and basket at her feet, Aeris grabbed the rope and hauled the pail up.

A shaking hand shot through with veins and wrinkles dipped a tin cup into the bucket and brought it up to an equally wrinkled mouth. The woman drank, three cups full before letting out a sigh of repletion, and packed her cup away in a knapsack tied at her waist.

"Ah, that was lovely." She set the end of her walking stick down on the ground and turned her face up, and Aeris saw eyes like violets that looked oddly young and sharp for such a wizened face. "Thank you, dear. Not many young people would go out of their way to help the elderly these days."

She smiled warmly at the gray-haired woman. "You're welcome. But it wasn't out of the way at all. We were just stopping by the stream on our way home."

The woman looked at the sheep lined along the pockets of water diverted from the stream by farmers and shepherds for watering livestock and other animals. "You have a good-looking herd here. Their fleece look healthy and plentiful. I see the dry weather hasn't been too hard on them?"

Aeris shook her head. "It hasn't been so dry that much of the grass has died. As long as the grass is growing and there's the stream, they're fine. They have the whole of the land as their dinner and all we have to do is keep moving along and finding good fields for them to graze in."

"Your herd must be the biggest one I've seen out here. What is your secret or do you get a lot of young ones during lambing season?"

Her bluntness made Aeris laugh. "No secret. We raise them mainly for wool so some of our sheep are quite old." There was also the fact that Aeris had brought her family's dozen or so sheep with her when she and Tifa first came to live on the farm, but Tifa swore that it was Aeris' handling of them that caused them to grow so well—she knew the land like the back of her hand and took the herd to all the best meadows with the plants that the sheep were particularly fond of.

"A young girl out on the range with the sheep the whole day," the old woman said, turning back around to face Aeris. "You don't know what you might meet up with out here all by yourself."

"You mean a squirrel or a rabbit?" Aeris chuckled. Like their father, the farm's former sheepdog, Daisy and Lucy were not only fiercely protective of the sheep, but aggressive to the point of being suicidal so that only the leanest and meanest hungry wolves dared come within range of the herd.

"What happened to the handsome young man who used to watch the sheep with you?"

"Zack?" Aeris asked in surprise. The last time she and Zack had taken the sheep out together had been when both his father and mother were still alive.

"Yes, I believe that was the lad's name."

"He's out with the other men, helping to dig a new well on one of the other farms." She waved a hand vaguely at the bridge over the stream and the farmhouses on the other side. "It's been tough trying to reach any water in this drought, though."

The woman nodded wisely. "It's everywhere around you. If they would but look with their hearts and not their eyes. You would follow your heart..." Her eyes slid back to Aeris, a speculative gleam in their depths. "Aeris, isn't it?"

Aeris glanced uneasily at the elderly woman. "Forgive me, but I don't recall your name…" Since the days when caravans had paved the trail, travelers seldom passed through the region anymore and Aeris was quite certain this woman was a stranger to her.

"We've met a few times but you wouldn't remember it," the woman replied. "I've known you since you were a mere thought in your mother's mind and have visited you a time or two."

"My apologies," she said, confused. "I usually don't forget faces…"

A sly look crossed the wizened face. "You will soon be able to remember mine."

Aeris blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"Your destiny, lass," said the woman. "It is written in the stars."

She decided the sun and thirst must have addled the poor woman's wits, and she was probably in need of some rest and food as well. "You're a long way from the nearest town. May I ask where you're going?"

"Here and there. Everywhere."

The reply was as cryptic as could be but Aeris refrained from probing further. "Well, we have little in the way of amenities to offer but what we do have, we will gladly share with you. If you need a place to stay for a few nights, we have an empty cot—"

"Your sheep's wandering from the stream, dear."

Aeris spun around. "Oh no!"

Daisy and Lucy were already on the escaping sheep, growling and driving them back toward the herd but Aeris sprang forward to give chase to a tiny lamb bouncing happily down the path toward them. She headed it off and caught it quickly, and was halfway back to the well with the sheep in her arms when she chanced to look up and was brought to a stop. The well stood empty but for her shepherd's staff and basket, everything she'd spilled tucked neatly back inside.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"Look, there ain't nothin' down there," the burly, red-bearded farmer, Ivan, grumbled. "It's time we pack that hole back up an' call it a day."

And start looking around for a new spot to dig again tomorrow, Zack thought wearily. He glanced down at his friend, Hans, who was lying on his back in the grass with his hat over his face. "The sun's gone down." It hadn't completely; they could still see it, a blazing red-yellow sphere hanging low in the sky, part of it hidden behind the horizon, but they had little daylight left.

The three men were sitting under a tree, supposedly polishing off the last of the food they'd brought with them. Facing them at a slight incline were mounds of dirt and rock that surrounded the hole they'd made of the earth—a hole big enough to fit two grown men in, digging back to back. A few yards away, two other farmers were sitting with their backs against a slab of rock that jutted out from the ground, sharing a jug of ale. Somewhere on another farm there was probably another shaft identical to the one they were looking at, with no sign of moisture to be found, another family in need of a water well.

For all the green grass growing nearly year-round wherever a patch of grass was to be found, the ground below seemed drier than the desert at high noon. There was water, Zack knew, but it was too far down, and once past the first couple of feet of soft damp earth, the earth quickly became hard as rock until it was like hacking through crumbly marble around the fifteen feet mark, and there was a serious risk of the sides caving in the deeper they went. They would have to try their luck elsewhere on the farm to see if they couldn't hit water sooner or go through less rocky dirt. The other man was right but he did not look forward to the process of starting all over again.

"I don't see no other choice but to tell the womenfolk we will most likely be followin' the old wagon trail ourselves in a couple of years if things don't start lookin' up," Ivan said.

Zack's shoulders slumped. "I don't know how I'm going to tell the girls." He stared at the hunk of goat cheese still wrapped in a white cloth that Tifa had gotten from one of the other farms and the loaf of bread sitting in his lunchbox, only half eaten. He never had much of an appetite anymore. "They love this place. It's our home, where we were brought up together, and became a family. All of our parents were buried here, Father and Mother, our dog…" Well, Cait Sith had really been his dog whom he'd raised from a pup, but Aeris and Tifa had loved the sheepdog just as much and spoiled the old boy rotten.

"I have no idea how I'm gonna break it to my folks either." Hans's voice came out from under his hat, surly, tired. "Martha won't want to hear it for sure." Martha was Hans' younger sister. Besides Martha and Hans, there was Henry, their eldest brother who'd taken a wife last fall.

"If I didn't know better, I'd say the fairies have a hand in this," Ivan muttered. "They should use their powers for good once in a blue moon and help us poor folk out some." The farmer's face turned thoughtful. "Maybe we can all put our heads together and think of something to catch one and force it to give us a wish."

"I don't know." Zack smiled half-heartedly. "There's probably one somewhere hereabouts listening to us even as we speak. It'd be kind of hard to spring a trap on them when they already know everything we're planning."

"Humph," the older man said in a tone of disgruntlement. "It can't be any harder settin' a trap for a fairy than it is to find water around here anymore."

"Maybe we'll have more rainfall this year," Zack said without any real hope. "It can't be like this forever, can it?"

Hans sat up. "Let's pack it up and go home."

Zack let out a deep sigh and began putting away his leftover food.


	2. Chapter 2

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Two**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

Aeris stood at a fork in the old dirt road carved by covered wagons, carts, and all manners of conveyances and beasts of burden many years ago, watching her sheep at the stream. Quite a ways behind her was the wooden bridge that the first settlers had built and not too far from that was the well she'd spotted the old woman at a week ago.

A smile curved her lips as she tried to imagine what the hills must have looked liked in those days, and in times past, before people had arrived, when the land was untouched, untamed, more wild than it was now, when there were no farmhouses or barns or fences to mar the landscape and animals in greater numbers roamed the hills. Her eyes fell on the stream, noting with a sigh of relief as she did every day that the water flowed as strong and clear as ever here. Groundwater may be hard to come by, but the stream's water was clean enough for animals to drink, and even for people, if it came to that.

A sudden noise behind her startled her, the sound of something falling, breaking through the thicket just a few yards from where she was standing, and hitting the ground hard, and she spun about, expecting to see some kind of large animal in the underbrush. There was only the dark shadows of the forest but as she turned away, she thought she heard a faint groan.

She looked back at the dogs who were also lapping water from the stream with the sheep and were too far away to have heard anything. Setting her basket and staff down as quietly as she could, she went toward the sound, treading softly, lightly on the grass, and peered into the underbrush.

Aeris gasped.

All her life she'd heard stories about the woodland folk that dwelled in the nearby forests, but like every other child who'd grown up on them, she'd thought them nothing more than fanciful tales. But one look at the stunning creature rolling over to sit up on the ground just out of the brambles and thorns of the bushes, and she knew him for what he was. He almost blended into the forest shadows despite the pale tone of his skin and the gold-blond hair that pointed in every direction.

He was also almost completely naked. Other than what looked like a loincloth made of some green leaf-like material, he wasn't wearing anything else.

He wiped his hands on the ground and carefully placed them back over his ribcage, and did not appear to notice her as she stood staring at him, utterly astounded.

"You're a fairy!" she finally burst out, still unable to believe her own eyes.

He glanced up, and she could see that he had startling blue eyes.

"You're real," she breathed. "Your kind is real!"

He tilted his head, and nodded slowly.

"You-you can understand me?"

"Yes," he spoke, his voice soft and low, that brought to her mind the cool forest trees and rich, warm earth. "I understand you."

"You understand…" she repeated, scarcely able to form a coherent thought, let alone speak, although he didn't seem to share her awe at having come face to face with a human. But if memory served her right, her mind raced frantically, it was said that fairies were not given to emotions as humans were.

He sat up on his knees and it was then that she realized his breathing was coming in quick, shallow breaths. She took a step forward and let out a cry as she saw something dark ooze out from between the stained fingers he held over the lower part of his chest.

"You're hurt!"

"An arrow…" he breathed deeply. "Can't stay here. Humans will see me. No telling what they will do."

"An arrow?" she asked, horrified. "Someone shot at you?"

"Not me. A bear. A cub. I jumped in front of it."

She blinked. "What?"

"A hunter in the forest," he said, staggering to his feet. "He must have taken it for a deer or something. He knew he missed his shot, but he caught sight of me and came after me. He probably thought I was the animal getting away."

She made a sound in her throat.

"I must get back inside the forest." He took a few steps, almost stumbling over his own feet, and she saw that he was in more pain than he let on.

"Wait! Let me help you! Did you remove the arrow?"

He didn't appear to have heard her as he pushed his way through the bushes and trees. Without thinking, she went after him.

"Please! Let me see the wound. Maybe I can help."

"You can't."

A small bark came from behind her and they both turned to see that a furry brown face had followed them into the forest. The dog's tail was whipping back and forth in agitation in a fiery red blur, and she was looking at them with big questioning eyes.

"Lucy!" Aeris had forgotten about the flock. "I need you to go back to the sheep," she ordered, keeping her voice as firm as she could manage. "Take care of them for me. I'll be fine, I promise."

The dog whinnied.

"Lucy, please! Go back to Daisy and the sheep. Take them home."

The dog gave another bark and ran back the way they'd come.

"The arrow?" she asked the fairy who was looking a little dazed.

"I pulled it out…"

"May I see it? Your wound."

"What I need is inside the forest. I'm fading fast. I already waited too long, hiding up in the trees from him. I couldn't stay up in the air any longer...or even cling to the branches."

"What do you mean you're fading?" she asked as she followed him deeper into the woods. "Fairies don't die, do they?"

"Die, fade, they're the same thing." His voice was getting weaker. "Wounds sustained by human weapons can be fatal for us if we don't get them treated quickly."

"Tell me what you need and I'll get it for you."

He almost fell backwards on top of her, but she caught his arm and held him up.

"Get me to the stream," he rasped, trying not to lean his full weight against her. "Follow it until you see some mushrooms growing at the base of the trees by the banks."

Aeris hadn't really been inside the woods since she was a young child, but she knew that the stream was to their left.

She headed for the sound of the rushing water with him becoming heavier and heavier with each step.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

She watched over him resting in the bower formed by the branches of a giant ash tree. Apparently fairy bodies were quite different from those of humans—they responded to treatment differently, healing much faster and were capable of undoing a potentially fatal injury in a matter of minutes with the right remedy. A 'remedy' that she had no doubt was a combination of both the medicinal properties of the flower and fairy magic.

She studied the gentle rise and fall of his chest, each indrawn breath slow and even, and as steady as it was going out, and she drew in a deep breath of relief herself. Her worried gaze became admiring as her eyes swept up to the fairy's face, and fell on long, golden lashes that left crescent shadows on high cheekbones. Pale though he was from his ordeal, he was still so beautiful her heart ached just looking at him. She thought the stories didn't do him justice: he was far more beautiful than they told.

The stories also said fairies were immortal beings with magic more powerful than any human invention could ever be. But this fairy had almost been killed by a human weapon today. At the thought, Aeris forced herself to look away from him and returned to her task.

The mushrooms weren't a very far walk from where they entered the forest but with a wounded fairy whose tenuous hold on life was increasingly weak, it seemed to take an excruciatingly long time until she'd found them. Not that she could have missed them. They grew all around the enormous trunks of ancient trees and were easily the size of a man's hand, and they glowed with some inner light source, making their bright purple color and pink dots even more conspicuous against the black foliage in the background. She'd never been this deep in the forest and had no idea such magnificent colors grew in the woods. But it was the flowers growing beneath and around the opaque mushroom caps that he'd been after, small, delicate, and lit a bright cyan from within as well as from the light of the moon and the stars that could be seen through the gaps in the canopy all along the banks of the stream. He'd been nearly catatonic and she could understand neither his mumbling nor gesturing so he'd tried to pick the tiny blue flowers and smash the small handful he'd gathered on a boulder with his fist, struggling with every breath, his movements lethargic and painfully slow. She'd watched helplessly, then followed his example, quickly picking the flowers and crushing them on a boulder with another rock, and putting it over the bleeding wound.

To her astonishment, the juice from the flowers appeared to be suctioned from the flowers by the wound, and they'd shriveled right before her very eyes as their light slowly went out.

Holding the crushed flowers over his ribcage, he'd stumbled to the massive trunk of the biggest ash tree Aeris had ever seen, where he'd sank down onto the grass and went to sleep guarded by its gnarled roots. She'd kept watch anxiously, and as his breathing slowly eased and became less harsh, she went back to collecting more flowers.

She'd quickly smashed another handful and carefully scooped it up with a lily pad she'd plucked from the stream, making sure she'd scraped all the liquid there was from the rock, and replaced the dried ones on his chest while he slept.

"You should go."

Her head snapped up from yet another batch of flowers she was pounding to a pulp, and the steady sound of a rock hammering in the woods ceased abruptly but its echoes continued to be heard off in the distance. The darkening forest had begun to make her work harder to see, even with the glow of the mushrooms and the flowers themselves providing her light.

"Will you be all right?" Night was falling fast, and Zack and Tifa were likely sick with worry by now. But she couldn't leave him if there was still the slightest possibility that he might need her help. "You won't…fade?"

"No." His voice was noticeably stronger now. "Thanks to you, I won't." He paused briefly. "Follow the stream. It will take you out of the forest."

"I know." Aeris scooped up the flowers she'd been working on and got to her feet. "I can find my way out." She couldn't really explain it but she didn't feel the least bit nervous about the woods as she should. She only knew that with him in the forest, she felt as safe in it as she did in her own room at the farmhouse.

"Most humans can't find their way in here," he said. "They always get lost."

"I won't. I'm not afraid of the forest."

"Good."

"I hope this is enough," she said, suddenly shy. "I couldn't really see what I was doing."

He swept the dried flowers from his chest and as he took her humble offering of sticky, mashed flowers from her, she leaned down to peer at the wound. It had grown a lot smaller and looked like it would seal completely soon.

"Thank you."

She nodded, and backed away from the ash tree. "I hope everything will be all right."

With one last look at his face, she turned and walked reluctantly from the clearing.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

Aeris followed the sparkling, moonlit stream, concentrating on the uneven ground and darting an occasional glance around at the trees. The forest had always felt full of magic, and never more so than on this night. The very air thrummed with it, and the silver moon and night sounds of the forest only magnified the feeling.

She came out of the woods near the same spot she took the sheep by almost every day and seeing her basket and staff still on the ground where she'd left them earlier, gathered them up and hurried homeward. Moments later, she was climbing the hill at the edge of the forest where their farm sat upon and saw that there was a light coming from the barn.

"Aeris!" A black-haired girl came running out of the barn. "What happened to you? Lucy and Daisy came back with the sheep without you! Zack took them out with him to look for you but it got too dark, and he came back to get a lantern—"

"Is he still inside the house?" At the other girl's nod, she started quickly for the house to catch Zack, and Tifa followed behind her. "I'm sorry for worrying you. Are all of the sheep safe and accounted for?"

"Yes, and the dogs have both been fed but they're restless and refusing to settle down. They keep running around the house, whining and looking for you."

Thank goodness for the dogs, she thought tiredly. Sheep weren't exactly known for their intelligence, but sheepdogs were and Aeris had always thought Lucy and Daisy were smarter and more protective than most dogs. With that and the bond between canine and sheep, it appeared the flock had been brought safely home, no thanks to her.

"I'm fine. I found…" she trailed off for a moment, wondering how much to tell her friend. "Someone had been hurt near the forest. I was trying to help him, and I'm afraid time got away from me."

"Near the… Aeris, tell me you didn't go inside the forest! And at this time of night?"

"He was hurt, Tifa," she said quietly.

"You could have been lost forever!" Tifa sighed. "As long as you're back safe, I suppose. Who was he? Did you walk him home?"

"He wasn't from one of the nearby farms," Aeris said evasively, and squirmed uncomfortably at what amounted to a little white lie. She stopped with her hand on the door handle, and turned back to face her. "But I made sure he was all right and could continue on his way before I parted ways with him. Don't worry, he just…needed some rest. He was mostly stunned by his fall, but he's okay now."

Before Tifa could question her further, she took a deep breath, reminded herself to act normal, and opened the door. After all, finding a wounded man might not be a common occurrence out in the hills but neither was it all that out of the ordinary.

But Aeris knew she would never be the same again.


	3. Chapter 3

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Three**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

Tifa had finished folding the laundry and was just slipping Aeris' blouse back inside her dresser when a fierce gust of wind swept into the room and something fell from the windowsill onto the rug.

She set the basket with the washing aside and crossed the small bedroom to pick it up.

Her lips pursed as she held up a long-stemmed white lily found along the banks of the stream. "Now where did you come from?" she asked the flower out loud. "I didn't see you on Aeris last night." Not that that meant anything. Aeris could have picked it a week ago or on any other day during the week, and unless Tifa was watching her every move like a hawk, it would have been easy to overlook. But lately Aeris had been coming home with a long face which meant that Tifa _had_ been keeping a particularly close eye on her.

She spun the flower slowly between her thumb and forefinger, observing the way the sunlight glinted so brightly on the huge snow-white petals, it seemed to reflect it back into the room. If anything could cheer Aeris up, it would have to be this particular flower, she thought, smiling. She brought the flower to her nose and inhaled of the clean-smelling scent that reminded her of water with just a hint of a floral fragrance.

The smile became a frown as her eyes slid to the fluttering curtains. "There she goes again," she said with a shake of her head. Prior to Zack moving into his parents' room after their passing and Tifa had moved into his, Aeris' habit of sleeping with the window open at night had been the only issue in the two girls sharing a room.

With a sigh she closed the window and placed the lily on Aeris' dressing table. It wouldn't do for her friend to find the flower on the floor where anyone could step on it.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"Hey! You forgot something!" A voice hollered from behind her and Aeris, yawning and rubbing her eyes, turned back and saw a tall figure running down the path in the darkness of dawn.

"Oh!" she gasped as the dark-haired young man caught up to her. From the look on his face, he must have called her several times. "I'm sorry, I didn't hear you."

"Clearly." Zack grinned at her, not the least bit winded from his run. "You're lucky Tifa saw it by the door or you would've had to make the walk back home for it again." He held up her bag containing the day's meal and snacks for her and the dogs, his eyes twinkling a merry blue, almost similar in color to the other pair her sleepy mind had been on.

"Or we could just go without food and starve," she said with a grateful smile as she took the bag from him. "Where would I be without you two?"

He chuckled. "A sack of bones drying out on the hills."

Aeris laughed at what was in all likelihood the truth. "I hope I didn't make you forget _your_ lunch?"

"Tifa's packing it." His eyes searched her face. "Aeris…"

She smiled at his uncharacteristic hesitation. "Yes?"

"If something was troubling you, you would let us know, wouldn't you? You would tell one of us."

The words had caught her off guard. "Yes. Why do you ask that?"

"No reason." He smiled back at her, but it was not his usual light-hearted smile. "But it's a beautiful morning. Maybe things will be better today."

Remorse filled her at the realization that her melancholy had not gone unnoticed by her friends. "Yes. I believe they will be." She resolved to put on a happier face for them, regardless of how the day turned out. Her mind wandered to the flower she'd found on her dressing table the previous evening, and her happiness was not forced at all. "Good luck with the men today, Zack. I'll see you at dinner." She gave him one last reassuring smile and hurried off to catch up with the sheep.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

Aeris brought her flock to the northernmost trenches branching from the stream and as some of the sheep gathered around the small ditches and holes while others were forced to wait their turn, she made her way to the fork in the road, letting her eyes drift over the woods that seemed so dark and foreboding to humans. In spite of the silence, it teemed with forest life though few humans set foot far inside it. Men were known to go into the woods in search of game and come out miles away from where they'd started after days of wandering in circles. Children playing by kept their distance but every so often, a brave one would come forward and enter it on a dare. However, they were careful to keep the hills in their sights at all times for their parents had warned them plenty of times that the forest was enchanted and if they turned their backs to the hills, when they turned around, the forest would have closed in on them.

She didn't know when she'd first felt it but at some point, she became aware that she wasn't alone. Someone was watching her.

Slowly she turned her head a little to the left.

The bluest eyes she'd ever seen framed by thick, blond lashes met hers and she found she couldn't move. He stepped noiselessly out of the shadows of the trees and the movement seemed to break her from her trance. Her eyes automatically went straight to his abdominal area. There were no marks there, not even a scar, just smooth pale skin covering hard muscles on a lean, tight torso.

Suddenly realizing where she was looking, she flushed and looked up, immediately encountering those blue eyes watching her intently, and blushed harder under his bold scrutiny.

"Hello." She smiled at him, a nervous, shy smile that was not at all like her. "I thought… I feared I'd dreamed it all but you're real."

He gave a small nod and Aeris felt a surge of elation flood through her.

"This isn't a trick then?"

His eyes widened slightly, and she chided herself silently. No, it wouldn't be. He seemed so different from the fairies she'd heard about in the stories—quiet, courteous, even curious, nothing like she'd been told.

He had yet to take his eyes from her face, Aeris noticed, and felt her face grow hotter. Unlike before he was looking at her as if he was as fascinated by her as she was by him. And if she wasn't mistaken, it looked like the fairy's cheekbones had a faint pink tint to them. The thought made her heart beat faster.

"I didn't think you were real," she said self-consciously, suddenly all too aware of how she must look after a day out in the fields with the sheep. Loose curls that had escaped from her ribbon blew gently about her face in the light breeze, and she quickly tucked them back behind her ears hastily. "The stories say we can't see you, that you move among us, invisible to the human eye."

"Not invisible," he said, and she thrilled to hear the sound of his voice again. "But you can see me because I choose to let you see me."

"Is that why I was able to see you last time too?" Aeris asked, puzzled.

He shook his head. "You saw me then because I wasn't able to control my surroundings anymore. I didn't have the strength to do anything. I was just trying to hold myself together so you wouldn't see my true form and become frightened. If I'd faded, you most certainly would have seen what I really look like."

"You mean, all of this…" Aeris made a gesture with her hand at him, her eyes widening as she recalled what he'd said to her at their first meeting. "You have wings."

He gave the merest hint of a nod.

Glamour.

Of course. She'd heard of it before. He was hiding his wings from her.

The sheer wonder of her discovery, of him, and everything he represented was almost more than her mind could fathom. She could only look at him in awe, standing just at the fringe of the forest, as full of mystery as those woods behind him, wondering what other secrets they both held.

"What is your name?" She finally found her voice again to ask. "I didn't get your name last time."

He gazed at her for a long moment before he spoke, "In your language, my name would be translated as 'Cloud'."

"Cloud," she whispered. She said it again, louder. "Cloud. I'm Aeris."

He inclined his head.

"Aeris," he said. "I've been watching you."

Her eyebrows rose.

"Why?" she asked. "Because I saw you…?"

"No," he was quick to reply. "I've been watching you since we were both children. You live with Tifa and Zack."

"Have you been watching them too?"

There was a short pause before he answered. "We watch all of you."

"That…that's not a very nice thing to do…" Blond brows drew together slightly but the blue eyes watching her were calm, and she flushed and stammered, "I-I don't mean to offend but we…_humans _don't like to be watched without our knowing about it."

"We watch to learn, to see, to do what we can to protect the planet but without interfering." His voice remained polite but she had the distinct impression that he was not at all pleased with the conversation.

"But…we like our privacy. It feels invasive, having strangers watch us."

"We don't go into your homes. Not onto your land either for the most part. Any place where humans have settled and claimed for their own is off limits to us." He appeared to think about it for a second. "Well, the king and queen and their advisors go into people's homes sometimes, but the rest of us are forbidden to do so. We watch from afar." There was no change in the tone of his voice but she sensed his growing displeasure. His next words confirmed her suspicion. "I only came to say "Thank you"."

Her heart sank.

It had been silly of her but a part of her had hoped…

She dropped her eyes and hung her head. "There was no need," she whispered miserably. "I am deeply sorry if I've upset you. It is not my place to question anything fairies do. Watch us by all means but this just feels much nicer…being able to see you as well," she forced herself to finish. "I meant no disrespect."

No reply came and she thought he had left and vanished back into the woods.

"I think it feels nicer too."

Aeris' head shot up. "You do?"

There was no trace of anger on his face that she could see. "They must want to move on," he said, gazing past her shoulder.

She looked back behind her. The sheep appeared to be trying to scatter about, with not a single one heading in the same direction as its neighbors. The dogs were keeping the animals in line but they were all clearly ready to go home.

_Naturally_, she thought with a rueful smile.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"All right, who's helping me with the dishes?" Tifa asked, disappearing through the doorway into the tiny kitchen with the leftover blueberry pie that would be packed for lunch the next day.

Sitting at the table, Aeris lifted her eyebrow at Zack. He lifted a black brow back at her.

She sighed and threw her last piece of cornbread at him. His hand flew up, catching the bread easily and popping it into his mouth.

"Hey, I brought in the water and heated it," he said, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands behind his head as he chewed and swallowed the bread down.

Aeris got up and began clearing the table. "I was hoping you'd forgotten that."

"Not a chance." He propped his feet up on Tifa's chair and grinned lazily at her. "And I didn't forget that I had to chase you halfway across the hills this morning either."

She rolled her eyes. "It was just the next hill over."

"Hurry up, whoever has cleanup duty tonight!" Tifa called from the kitchen. "A rabbit spooked one of the mules this afternoon and he overturned the cart. I'm still sore. I need you to carry the dishes into the kitchen for me."

Zack chuckled.

"It's not funny, Zack!"

Aeris burst out laughing at the expression on his face.

"I swear, she's got ears like a bat," he muttered.

Still giggling, she swept through the doorway with a stack of plates and bowls.


	4. Chapter 4

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Four**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

A couple of days later, unable to help herself, Aeris took her sheep to a large meadow overgrown with grass and leaving Daisy and Lucy to keep watch, retraced her steps back until she came to a herd of cows grazing in a nearby field. The sound of cattle lowing could be heard far behind her as she climbed the hills and passed a farm on her way to the abandoned well.

On the dirt road again, she stood for a time lost in thought, her face turned toward the black forest where she'd first heard a rustling in the bushes that had led to a moment in her life that she would never forget. Her eyes moved to the right, following the path of the main road which she knew took it to a natural divide in the woods a few miles from where the first farmhouses were located, halving the forest. From there, man had continued the path into the hills, cutting out a road that ran alongside the forest line for a bit before splitting and becoming two paths near where she was standing, one path following the curve of the stream south into the open hills and the other leading back up north into the forest. The wilderness had all but reclaimed the forest trail; vines and tendrils from the undergrowth had crept back over the surface, and plants and roots had forced their way through the topsoil, crowding the surface, covering and hiding it from the unsuspecting traveler.

Aeris felt the back of her neck prickle.

"You're here, aren't you?" she asked softly, not sure if she should turn to look.

He moved so silently she didn't hear him, but he was suddenly standing beside her. She knew it was him, the one called Cloud, by the way her skin was tingling everywhere and all her senses seemed to come alive. She turned to face him and was again hypnotized by his very being, so unlike anything she'd ever known, raw, earthy, yet otherworldly. It was hard to believe that he had a form other than the one she beheld, so breathtaking was it.

"You were waiting for me." It was a statement, made quietly and with the certainty of one who already knew the answer.

"Yes." Perhaps she'd presumed too much. The thought made her hesitate. "Cloud."

His eyes were on her face, regarding her in that quiet, penetrating way of his. He held his hand out. "Come."

"My sheep, my dogs. I left them…"

"Nothing will happen to them."

She didn't have to think anymore about it. She slipped her hand into his and let him lead her down the hidden path that no human feet tread anymore, into the dark, mysterious woods.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"If you'll go pick the berries, I'll see what I can do about it," Tifa said. "Now."

"Here I am, thinking I'll get one day to relax a bit but you keep giving me things to do," Zack grumbled good-naturedly. He had come home early and was helping to put the remaining chickens back into the coop. "Can't a man go one day without having to do any heavy work?"

"Be glad I'm not making you split firewood for next year's stockpile or you'll really have something to complain about," she replied, referring to the stack of wood sitting in the yard that she'd been nagging him about on the days he was home working on the farm. "To hear you tell it, you boys have had it easy with the ground being so hard up at the Lewises place anyway. Didn't you say there are days when no work seems to get done?"

He frowned. "We might not have much to show for it but we're still working. Having to be so careful when digging can be very difficult and tiring on us, as well as frustrating."

"As it is for all of us," Tifa sighed and wiped her arm across her forehead in an effort to brush the midnight-black strands of hair out of her eyes. "I just hope this new run of good luck holds up." She shut the door after the last squawking hen and threw the bolt. "Pray the gods keep looking down on us with favor. And fairies."

"Sometimes, I don't think I believe in them. Or if I do, not the good ones anyway." He walked with her to the side of the yard where the well hand pump was installed.

"Bite your tongue." Tifa removed the wooden bowl hanging over the spout and set it aside before picking up the soap from the base as Zack took hold of the handle and worked it up and down to fill the bucket for them to wash up. "That's all we need, a fairy angry at us. What are you going to do if you go back to the farm tomorrow and find a hole with nothing but rocks waiting for you again?" she asked, passing him the soap scented with lemon zest she'd bought on her last trip to town.

"You know," he said thoughtfully as he lathered his hands. "Something funny's going on around here."

"Funny business always means fairies are about."

"I'm serious. Ivan brought up fairy trickery too but he was probably just repeating what his wife and all the other women say." He poured a cup of water over one hand then the other while Tifa dried her hands on her apron. "I doubt he believed it. But I wonder if he's not onto something."

"You just said you don't believe in fairies."

"I don't believe it's fairies but something is definitely—" Zack began but two furry animals leaped on them, almost throwing them off their balance. "Hey, whoa! What's all of this today? Has Aeris been sneaking you treats again?"

"You mean like you do?" Tifa asked, trying to fend Daisy off before the dog's paws ruined another dress. "Don't think I didn't see you slipping them the bones from your plate the other night."

"It's their favorite treat," he said indulgently, scratching both dogs' ears.

"And you thought _we_ spoiled Cait Sith," she said in a reproachful tone. "Come to think of it, the dogs have been coming home excited quite a bit, haven't they?"

"I'm telling you there's something—"

"Tifa? Zack? We're home!" Aeris came around from the back of the house with her basket, and smiled at the sight of the dogs running in circles around them. "I see the girls sniffed you out. What are you doing out here?"

"Tifa's baking a raspberry cake for dinner," Zack announced, ignoring the brown eyes narrowing at him to smile at the other ones lit a bright, happy green. "We hit pay dirt today."

"Zack, that's wonderful!" Aeris exclaimed. "What a relief! The Lewises must be so happy. We should celebrate—"

"That's what I've been trying to tell someone here," he grinned unrepentantly. "Megan and Philip were particularly thrilled to know they won't have to haul water from the neighbors for much longer. They were singing and dancing around the hole when we left. I think I even saw the baby doing cartwheels."

"Those poor children," Aeris chuckled. "I don't blame them. And now, we'll have one more new well soon and another family we don't have to worry about for a few years."

"Unfortunately _we_ will not be having cake tonight unless someone here goes and picks the berries for it as he knows he ought to have done as soon as he got home," Tifa said with a meaningful look at Zack.

"But it's getting late." He gave his best frightened-little-boy look. "You're going to send me into the woods all by myself when it will be getting dark soon?"

"Then maybe you should stop putting it off and get to it. No berries, no cake."

"Speaking of the woods, we were just talking about the strange goings-on around here," Zack said as Aeris set her basket and the wooden bowl on the base beside the bucket and proceeded to wash the plants she'd found. "Tifa thinks it's fairies."

"I didn't say it was fairies for sure," Tifa protested. "I just think…it's a possibility."

"Oh?" Aeris busied herself cleaning a small bundle of wild garlic as Zack quickly took up the handle on the well again and pumped more water into the bucket for her. "What strange things?"

"Well, for one, how is it that the hills stay green but the wells keep going dry?" Zack, rather predictably, going by the looks on both girls' faces, had settled on the problem foremost in all their minds.

"You know why." Tifa's tone was that of an adult who'd explained the same thing a hundred times to a dull-witted child. "It rains almost every night."

"So how come it's like we have a drought and the wells dry up so quickly?"

"That's because as often as it rains, it's just enough to get the ground wet. We hardly ever even see a puddle. The grass can grow on that but that doesn't mean there's enough to reach deep underground to feed the wells.

"Huh." Zack wasn't convinced. "What do you think, Aeris?"

Aeris' brows knitted in a frown. "I think Tifa's right," she said at length. "It's more of a sprinkle and it never lasts for more than a few minutes. There's not enough rain to get down to the wells." She placed the last plants in the basket and wiped her hands on her skirt. "Shall we go, Zack?"

"Go?" he asked blankly.

"To pick some raspberries." A delicately winged eyebrow arched upward. "You still want that cake, don't you?"

He brightened. "Really?"

"I have to," she said with a little laugh. "We all know you're not going to stop whining until you get that cake."

"Whining!" He gave her a hurt look.

"Oh, please, anything but that." Tifa pretended to shudder at the thought as she took the basket from Aeris. "You two go pick the berries and I'll get dinner started. Just make sure you stay near the perimeters of the forest!" she called after them as they hurried away.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

The next time Aeris saw him, she didn't have to wait for him.

She'd been back to the old well several times but had left each time, alone and dejected. On her fourth visit by the well in as many days since their last meeting, she knew as she came up the path that her trip this time would not be met with disappointment. He was at the fork by the stream where she'd first found him, and again, he led her into the forest. He didn't take her back to the grove of ash trees as he had before but deeper into the forest until the sound of rushing water became a loud cacophony of trickles and splashes. As she stepped out from behind the giant leaves of an arrowhead plant, Aeris saw that he'd brought her to a clearing where the stream's current was slowed by huge, massive rocks sunk into the streambed and mounted atop each other like great stepping stones. Water cascaded over, around, and under the stones, creating a series of miniature waterfalls and white misty foam that made Aeris' mouth fall open in wonderment.

Inside the haven of the woods, safe from any prying human eyes, they stood face to face on a moss-covered boulder in the middle of the stream, staring into each other's eyes as the sun's rays shone down upon them through the opening in the forest canopy and water trickled under the stones beneath their feet. A faint blush crept up Aeris' cheeks as she rose up on her toes, lifted her face to his, and held her breath.

His eyes roved over her face, reading the message there. The unearthly beauty of the man before her held her spellbound, and made her heart pound faster and her breath hitch in her throat as she waited for him to decipher her intention, her offering…wondering what he would do.

"Cloud."

His name was a whisper.

The fairy bent his head and touched his lips to hers.

The world split open.


	5. Chapter 5

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Five**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

Two mornings later, Aeris awakened to find a flower sitting on her bedroom windowsill. Nostalgia swamped her as she picked the lily up with trembling fingers, memories of happier times when she would gather bouquets of the flowers while watering the sheep and bring them home for her mother and then later Zack's mother.

When she saw him, she had the flower in her hand.

"You were the one who left this on my window." She looked uncertainly at him. "Weren't you?"

The slightest inclination of his head was her answer. In some forgotten corner of her heart, joy pierced through the pain she'd buried deep, easing the sorrow that had been entrenched there since the deaths of both her parents.

She cleared her throat and smiled at him. "It's beautiful." She tilted her head to one side, trying to read his expression. "This isn't the first time you've given me a flower."

"No."

"How did you know it's my favorite flower?"

"I didn't." His face was inscrutable. "I thought it suited you."

"Then…you were at the farm?"

"There are ways I can get a flower to you without having to be anywhere near your farm."

Aeris wondered about that but before she could say anything, he held his hand out, and she remembered there was something else she wanted to ask him.

"Do you… Would you mind if we stay out in the hills with the sheep today?" she said hesitantly, and blurted out the rest in a quick rush. "It is possible, right? The land out there doesn't belong to anyone."

He went so still, she didn't think he breathed. His eyes searched hers.

She held her own breath.

"I've been waiting for you to ask me that."

She was so giddy, she could have danced all the way back to where she'd left her flock. It took every ounce of self-control she had to restrain herself from doing so, and just barely managed to walk sedately beside him, but she was unable to prevent the huge grin on her face and she thought her feet didn't quite touch the ground as they made the trek back.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

Out in the fields the dogs circled and sniffed the fairy to their hearts' content, then perceiving that he wasn't there to eat their sheep, apparently arrived at the conclusion that he must have come to help watch them. Affronted at the idea that Aeris would think they needed any help in keeping their charges safe they became overzealous in nipping and yipping at the heels of the sheep and herding them so close together that the poor animals couldn't graze and baaed pathetically.

Only after she had Cloud feed the dogs a piece of jerky and scratched their heads did they understand that both she and the fairy knew they were doing a fine job and he wasn't there to take over their duties, and mollified, they let the sheep scatter to look for their favorite plants.

"They're different with you," Aeris mused, watching Lucy and Daisy settle down to their job. "At home they're very friendly when a neighbor comes to visit, but when we're out here with the sheep and someone happens by, they usually growl and bark and bare their fangs, and won't let up until they're gone."

"They know I'm not a human," he said simply. "The dogs can sense that I'm not a threat to the sheep. They just had to make sure and they wanted to prove to you that they can protect the sheep."

She grinned. "I see." He already knew the dogs' personalities as well as she did.

They sat together for a while and she took full advantage of the opportunity to satisfy her curiosity about his life and his people, asking him so many questions that he did most of the talking for once, but it wasn't long before he told her he had to go back.

She bit her lip. "Will I see you tomorrow?"

"I'll let you know."

Aeris mulled over his answer after he took his leave, but it wasn't until she found another flower in the morning that she comprehended his meaning; the flowers were his way of telling her when he could meet with her. She cherished the sight of the lilies on her window each morning all the more for the message they held.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~ <strong>

"Do you see that?" Zack nodded toward the window.

Tifa's eyes narrowed as she studied the girl sitting in the chair by the front window. A book lay open on her lap but Aeris seemed to have forgotten about it; she sat, arms folded across the windowsill and chin resting upon them, gazing out into the night.

"She doesn't even hear us," she said disbelievingly. Unlike Zack, she didn't bother to whisper. Their companion was clearly oblivious to everything else around her.

"She's been doing that a lot. Sometimes, she's smiling for no reason, like she's doing now. Other times, she looks like she wants to cry." He kept his voice low. "What do you suppose she's thinking about?"

Tifa glanced sharply at him. "I'm sure it's nothing to worry about," she smiled reassuringly.

She threw the rag she'd been shining the small table with onto the book Aeris was reading, causing her to jerk her head back from the window. The brunette glanced down at the towel over the book in her lap then over at the fireplace and finally seemed to notice she wasn't the only person in the room.

"What's with you tonight?" Tifa demanded.

Emerald green eyes widened. "What do you mean?"

"You're…distracted." Tifa's frown deepened. "You've been sitting there with a dreamy look on your face all evening."

"I was just thinking about…things."

"What things?" Zack wanted to know.

"Just…things." Aeris smiled brightly at them. "Nothing important."

Zack's face was skeptical. "What are you reading?"

To their surprise, their friend's face colored and she averted her gaze. "Fairy stories," she murmured. "I just began a new one…" She held the book up to show them the cover and Tifa saw that it was a recent purchase she'd made with the gil she'd received for some fleeces. As one of the few books they had in the house, Tifa and Aeris had taken to reading a story aloud from it after dinner as they sat around the table or in the living room. Like most of the other families, gathering together in the evenings for some storytelling or reading after the workday was over had been a pastime that they'd all enjoyed on the farm, Zack's mother in particular, and they'd chosen to continue the tradition in honor of her memory.

Hardly anything worth blushing about, Tifa thought. She gave her a hard look. "Well, come over here. We need your input on what to do about the garden. Zack and I have been racking our brains the last half hour but have no solution to speak of. I'll finish reading your story for you tomorrow night."

"Oh." Aeris looked guiltily at them.

Their neighbors relied on the few farms that had a well pump to help provide them with some good vegetables for their tables but with Zack out in the field with the men most days, that meant one less person to help till, water, and weed the garden. They lacked the physical labor necessary to keep up a good-sized garden. The answer to their problem was obvious. It was just that none of them wanted to say it out loud as it was practically akin to admitting defeat as far as they were concerned.

Aeris said what they were all thinking, what they knew had to be done. "We'll have to switch out one of the crops." She meant a fruit or a vegetable that would require less attention and work but even that was debatable. The other farms weren't going to be very happy, but it was better than the alternative of doing away with a crop entirely and not replacing it at all.

She moved the chair over to the table in front of the fireplace and sat back down with Zack and Tifa.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~ <strong>

"These are beautiful." She reached out to touch the white petal of a flower that grew all along the stream out in the hills. "Tifa always laughs when I say that this is my favorite flower because they're everywhere. I used to pick them all the time when we were children."

Hooded blue eyes that had been watching her from under thick, golden eyelashes swept up to her face. "Everywhere?" His lashes lowered again. "We think otherwise." Aeris listened closely as he spoke, noting with interest how the soft timbre of his voice seemed to be in perfect accord with the melodic drone of the tiny waterfalls around them where they sat on a giant boulder at the edge of the stream with the cold water running over their bare feet.

"I… I have noticed they become quite sparse the deeper we go and don't seem to grow very far inside the woods."

His eyes shifted back up to hers. "This is the only part of the world where they're found anymore."

The thought saddened her. "Then I hope they continue to grow and thrive here for a long time."

"They're a favorite at the court and are seen everywhere during celebrations and feasts."

"The fairy king and queen's court?"

He gave a nod. "They're water lilies."

"We just call them wild lilies." She glanced at him in surprise. "I thought water lilies were the ones that are found in ponds and still waters."

Cloud shook his head. "These are true water lilies. Notice how they grow on land, near the stream but not close enough to actually be in the water. They're indicators," he explained. "They let you know water is nearby, sometimes just a few feet under the surface, sometimes over a hundred feet away. They grow in clusters with their stalks extending downward to become a single bigger root so that they oftentimes look like great masses of ropes nearer the surface. The main root lies submerged in an underground pool or water of some sort, allowing it to absorb what moisture the flowers need and retain it for long periods of time when in drought. Even after they're plucked, they can live for months if their stems are in water."

She watched his face, looking for some indication of his feelings. "Yes, I always thought it was fascinating how they could live so long without their roots."

"Once, they used to grow all over the hills." His voice sounded almost wistful as he looked out into the woods. "My mother tells me that come springtime and all throughout summer and into early autumn, you could look out and see a sea of white and green that was as vast as the ocean. The grass, too, covered the hills and was really long and green in those days, all year long."

"Until humans came," she finished softly for him. "And the flowers stopped growing."

"There is water here but the ground underneath isn't level either, and it can be a lot harder to reach water in one spot than it is just a few yards away. The water was also being drawn up too quickly and couldn't be replenished fast enough." He turned his face back to her. "After most of the humans left, we prevented the flowers from growing back on the hillsides anymore."

"Because of us?"

"It is true that unsettled land attracts humans. Rich, fertile, unsettled land even more so." He broke off the stalk of a bulb that was just beginning to open, and her eyes went round as he touched a finger to a petal, and the flower blossomed in his hand. "But a lot of the water was used up. If water lilies remain buried underground and don't sprout, they hardly use any water at all."

He held the flower out to her.

"What a sight it must have been," Aeris said sadly, taking it from him and tracing her forefinger over the delicate pink and yellow inner petal of the young flower. She could almost see the hills, not fields of rock and dirt and grass as they were now, but covered entirely with leafy white flowers waving whichever way the wind blew. "How beautiful the hills must have looked."

He nodded again. "You say that about a lot of things. The flowers, the hills, the forests, the stream. Is there anything not beautiful to you?"

She gave a small laugh. "No, I don't think so." She turned her gaze upon him, he who was more beautiful than any of those things. What would he say if she told him that? she wondered, and her lips twitched at the thought. "Tifa and Zack say that about me, too. For them, our farm, our land, the hills, they're all inside of them. They're in their blood, and nothing can compare to them. But for me, it's everything the world has to offer. Show me the leaf of a tree I haven't seen before, and I would probably be just as taken by it as I would be by a desert flower. As long as I'm surrounded by nature, I feel at home."

The fairy's eyes went to the lily in her hand. "It is beautiful," he said, lifting his head and their eyes met. "It's your flower. Aeris."

A hot flush crept up her neck and face. With anyone else, she'd say that was warmth and admiration she saw on his face. But she was likely attributing human emotions to a fairy. There were things about him that seemed so human sometimes that she kept forgetting he wasn't one and therefore did not possess the ability to feel as humans did.

"Thank you."


	6. Chapter 6

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Six**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

Sitting on the hill beside him, Aeris sneaked a glance at him out of the corner of her eye.

His kind lived in harmony with nature and everything about him spoke of that close, intimate relationship. From him she learned that it had been that way for them since the dawn of time, and despite what the stories said about fairies being unable to feel anything but mischief on their own, she was beginning to suspect differently. They were passionate creatures who cared for all living things and were fiercely protective and proud of the unique role they played in the life of the planet.

She also found out that fairies were by no means immortal, but their lifespan saw the passing of centuries and sometimes millenia. She learned many other things about them and about him. She learned that he was, in fact, by fairy standards, a very young fairy. He was even a year younger than her in human years. But he had a quiet seriousness and a kind of subtle assertiveness that was so easy to overlook, she could very well see how humans could mistake a personality like his for a lack of emotion. As it was, she had been chagrined to discover only recently how she herself had been cleverly tricked into thinking that she was the one guiding their conversations and making the decisions whenever they were together when he was, in reality, the one in charge of every situation. To Aeris, those same understated qualities that no casual observer would discern made him seem older than human boys the same age and indeed, she wasn't surprised when he told her that he was considered unusually mature for his age by fairies.

Sometimes when she was with him, she feared it was all just a dream. Surely he couldn't be real. What they had couldn't be real. It was magical. That was the only word she could find to describe it. And it was still nowhere near the caliber of what she felt.

Facing him fully now, Aeris lifted a hand.

His eyes fell upon the fingers she hadn't realized were curled, as though to grab him, to clutch him, to make sure he wasn't just a product of her wishful thinking.

He seemed to sense her unsettling thoughts; without a word, he took her hand and drew her into his lap. Her body instantly relaxed, and she let out a soft sigh and turned her face into his neck as she felt the warmth of his body against hers and breathed deeply of the fresh, clean scent she'd never known in any other living creature. He smelled of green leaves and springtime and cool breezes… She could never decide all the things he made her feel and think of but it felt like they had always been a part of her. "You're real…"

"I'm as real as you are."

Looking up, she met the heavenly blue eyes and felt her heart miss a beat as she saw that he understood what she wanted, what she was asking for.

He bent his head and kissed her.

It was so much more than just magical.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

The sun was just coming up over the hills when Tifa finished her last cup of milk and headed back out to the barn. After filling a large bowl with chicken feed, she retied the burlap sack and went out into the yard again to release the chickens.

"Here you go," she said, grabbing handfuls of the mix and scattering it to on the ground. "You know I didn't forget you."

There was a short moment of peace and quiet in the cool morning air as the squabbling chickens pecked busily at the ground. She quickly took advantage of the silence to confide to the farm animals what she couldn't share with her companions. "I'm beginning to think Zack is right about Aeris. Something isn't right with her." Tifa's eyebrows drew together. "Some days she comes home happy as a bee. Other days, she looks like her whole flock was taken by coyotes. And Zack…" she sighed.

Zack was a whole other matter.

She swept back inside the barn to see to the other animals.

"There's something he's not telling us." Hands on her hips, she chewed her bottom lip. A chestnut-colored mule poked its head out from one of the stalls and looked in the direction of the haystack by the corner. Tifa trudged forward to get it for him. "He's looking more tired every day. But things are looking up; it's not that bad. He's just becoming a worrywart, is all. Besides we still have the pump." Not long after the girls had moved in with Zack's family, the townspeople had decided to hire some folks from one of the cities to come out with a drill and requested the aid of the local farms in pooling their resources together to help offset the cost. Zack's parents had had the foresight to invest in a well pump but there was no question that if Tifa and Aeris hadn't agreed to put up their families' savings, their farm would not have been able to afford a well. Only five other families had been able to pay for a pump on their farms but so far, none of them had had a problem with their well failing yet.

"If worst comes to worst, we can always move house," she told the cow and her calf as she emptied another bucket into the water trough then did the same for the mules. But Tifa knew that wasn't likely. All the farms that had been deserted because of the fever were now occupied by new families, and just last week, an old friend of theirs had made it known to everyone of his intention to take up residence in the Thompsons' place by the end of summer with his new bride. The handful of farms built by settlers in the old days that were still around were little more than ramshackle buildings that let in all the elements and appeared to be forever teetering on the edge of collapse, which had everybody taking bets as to which house would be the first to be done in by a good gale of wind. They would probably be better off tearing down one of them and building a new house from the ground up.

"At least there's water in some of those wells." Not that she should count on that either, she thought grumpily, taking down a basket to go collect the eggs.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"Hey, isn't that your sheep?" Hans asked. The two men were heading toward the bridge that would take them back onto their side of the hills.

Zack followed his gaze and Hans noted with interest the smile that lit up the young farmer's face upon seeing the white blouse and pink dress coming up the trail on the other side of the stream with her flock.

"What are you thinking about with that look on your face?"

"What look?" Zack asked innocently.

Hans wasn't fooled. His friend was standing straighter and he'd seen how the smile had transformed his tired face. "For a man who's been toiling all day under the sun, you don't look none too unhappy." He crooked a brow at him. "Wait, let me guess, you got your eye on a new skirt."

"No new skirt," Zack said, pausing for a moment on the bridge to look over the rail at the water below them.

"Just better not be Matilda or someone will find himself in the pigpen with the slop," Hans threatened.

"Your family butchered the last of the pigs months ago," Zack grinned. "Can't a man be happy about the new well he's finally helping to get done after a series of false starts?"

"No. That was a smile about a girl, not a well." Hans tried not to let his concern show as he too peered down at the stream. Whoever the girl was, he already felt sorry for her. She was going to need all the luck she could get keeping all the other girls away from Zack. "And with the Whitleys waiting for their well, I don't see what to be so happy about."

He could feel the other man's eyes on him. "Don't worry," Zack said lightly. Hans watched in amusement as he ran a hand through his hair and shook the dirt from his shirt. "Your Matilda is quite safe from me, if that's what you're thinking." He waved at the brown-haired girl who had stopped by the stream, and she waved back. "You go on ahead, Hans. I'll walk home with Aeris."

"Now _that's_ a surprise to hear," he said wryly.

"You know I made a promise to my parents to look after the girls."

"I don't think this was quite what they meant."

Zack's eyes narrowed. "They're my responsibility. We're a family."

"All right, all right," he relented. "But you sure seem awful excited about walking home someone you live with and see every day." Hans looked at his friend with shrewd eyes. Well, both the girls Zack lived with were very comely to be sure and every boy in the hills had at one time or another entertained the thought of pursuing them. If it wasn't for Matilda, he would have tried his hand at courting one of them himself. "Don't tell me the fish has finally found a hook he likes?"

Zack didn't answer and that told Hans far more than he knew.

He let out a small whistle. Maybe he'd been too quick in thinking he was going to feel sorry for the new girl. Hans was of the opinion that men who were surrounded by too many pretty girls and never lacked for female attention may have a hard time choosing just one to be with, but when they finally fell, they fell hard.

"Those poor girls. Poor Martha." He tipped his hat at Zack. "Good day, Zack. Tell Tifa to expect Martha tomorrow, will you?"

He walked off whistling as Zack started down the other way.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

Aeris had her back to the stream, a pensive look on her face as she gazed upward at the vast emptiness above their heads. Other than a slight tightening of her hand around her shepherd's staff, she gave no sign of hearing or seeing him as Zack neared her.

"What are you looking at?" he inquired, taking up the basket of asparagus and squash leaves at her feet.

"The sky."

He flicked a quick glance at the early evening sky. "Looks the same as every other day."

"Does it?" A faint smile curved her lips. "I think it looks lovely tonight. It rather reminds me of someone's eyes."

"Why, thank you."

Aeris' laugh was like silver bells on the wind. "You do have very nice eyes," she said, turning to face him. "I've always said so."

"You and everybody else," he said cheerfully.

"Including you."

"Of course," he replied, raising his chin and giving her a haughty look that had her giggling.

"I take it you had a good day?"

He shrugged. "It was all right."

"You're smiling. It was better than 'all right'."

"That's not why I'm happy."

"Oh, so you're _happy_." Her eyes sparkled a laughing, dark green that was every bit as captivating as his own rare shade of blue that all the girls fell head over heels for. "Do tell."

His eyes narrowed on her face. "I don't think I will," he said, and chuckled at her pout as they set out for home. "Not unless you tell me why _you're_ happy."

"I'm happy because you're happy," she said promptly.

"Uh-huh."

"That's what Fanny and Martha and oh, all the other girls, would say, isn't it?" She placed a hand over her chest, fluttered her eyelashes, and pretended to swoon. "_Oh!_ He smiled at me again! Be still, my heart."

He fought back a grin. "You're not 'all the other girls'."

"Glad you noticed."

"Believe me, I've always noticed. Now stop trying to dodge the question."

She let out an exaggerated sigh. "Why else? I had a good day, too."

Zack gave her an extremely harassed look. "Right."

"Just look at the dogs—it's clear we had a great day. And look, I found strawberries!" She pointed to the leaves in the basket.

"Keep your secrets then." His own sigh was ruined by the chuckle that escaped him at the sight of Lucy and Daisy trying to hurry the sheep along and nearly tripping them in their eagerness. "But I change my mind about the girls. Whatever you've been doing with them, don't stop. I really haven't ever seen them like this before."

"I won't." She smiled fondly at Daisy who was walking nearest to her.

"They're going fast today," he remarked. "Think they're trying to tell us something?"

"That they're hungry?" she asked. "They're always hungry."

"They're not the only ones. I wonder what Tifa's got cooking for dinner."

"She said she was going to have a special treat for us tonight. Maybe something for dessert."

"Maybe it's omelets."

"Omelets?" Aeris wrinkled her nose daintily. "For dinner? Why would you think that?"

His lips twitched. "I guess because Hans was just telling me that Martha will be coming around tomorrow and it made me suddenly crave omelets. You should really hear him when he's going on and on about how our eggs are the best and why is it that they taste better than everyone else's and can he please come live with us?"

She chuckled. "Well, Tifa's been taught by the best. She knows what she's doing with the chickens."

"We do get a lot of eggs for the size of our flock. My mother used to send me over to their farm all the time for eggs when we were little."

"I think we all did. I was always bumping into one of the other children when I went to their place."

Zack gave a nod. "You have a way with the sheep and Tifa is good with the chickens and keeping house. With you girls around, I've got it made. Every man should have two girls running the farm for him."

A dark slender eyebrow rose. "If that's so, every woman should also have two men around to help her with the housework. Maybe we _should_ have Hans move in with us. We could use an extra pair of hands around the house."

He frowned. His freckled, red-headed friend was as hardworking and reliable a farmer as any man, or woman, could want in a companion. Perhaps a little too reliable, Zack thought, recalling how Hans hardly ever missed a day of work out on the farms with the men. "It's not the same thing," he said. "One strong, able-bodied man is all you need to do a man's work on a farm."

Aeris looked like she was trying not to laugh. "It's true men don't have as much to do and therefore aren't as useful as women, but that makes having two men more sensible than having one to help with the chores. You know, women's work."

"Not as useful?" Zack asked in mock outrage. He looked challengingly at her. "We'll see if you don't change your tune the next time you need a man to carry in the bathwater for you."

"I'll ask Hans to do it." She laughed at his scowl. "I'm sure he wouldn't mind."

* * *

><p><strong>Note:<strong> I just want to mention some wonderful readers who took the time to comment on this story. Scatterheart Angel, Captain Arbitrary, Animefan111, kairitheseventh princessofheart, BehindTheseCivilizedEyes, AcidCherry, and Gabriela Romero: My thanks to each and every one of you. Your kind words have been an endless source of encouragement and pleasure for me to read.


	7. Chapter 7

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Seven**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"You're here."

"Did you think I wouldn't be?" The fairy she'd been meeting in secret ducked out from the overhanging tree branches and came forward on silent feet. "You got the flower."

"I guess… a part of me is always worried you won't be here the next time I come," Aeris admitted. "But there's also another part of me that feels like this was meant to be and you wouldn't not be here. Sometimes, it feels like I've been waiting my whole life for this—like my entire life has been leading up to this moment."

The blue eyes looked almost surprised. "I've always known this would happen someday." His eyes held hers for a brief moment before he moved his head down toward hers and spoke again, his voice low. "Meeting you."

Her heart stopped, then began beating again, picking up speed faster and faster. "You have? How?"

"I just didn't know when it would happen. Or who it would be. But the day you found me I knew you were the one the stars had foretold of long ago."

"What do you mean?"

"You wouldn't understand," he said, leaning back again. "And you're not ready yet."

"Ready for what?"

"I'll tell you someday." He had his hand out for hers, Aeris realized. "But not today. There's something I want to show you, Aeris."

It was strange how just hearing him say her name could affect her. She forgot what they'd been discussing as she placed her hand in his waiting one and they slipped away into the forest.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"When the world was young and new," Tifa began in a voice loud enough to be heard over the sound of Zack working on his tools at the bench in the corner, "and always the fairy queen was jovial and filled with mirth, she often attended human gatherings with her court. And lo, what a marvelous sight it was to see the bright folk mingling and making merry with the nobles and peasants alike! And when the drums and flutes were at their peak, the queen would take from her hair the flower pure and white as the driven snow and whisper unto it, and petals would rain down upon the revelers until it looked like they were in the midst of a snowstorm in winter. Then everyone, men and women and children, would join in the fairies' dance, and wade through the soft, cold petals as laughter rang out across the land and joy was brought to all…"

Seated by the hearth across from Tifa, Aeris' brow puckered and she glanced up from the workman's boot in her lap that she was mending. Since the story Tifa had picked was a favorite among girls of all ages, it was certainly a tale she'd heard before…

"It happened that at one of these gatherings, a fair in a small town that was famed for their cloth spun from fine goat hair, there lived a girl, who was the daughter of the blacksmith's widow. She had proven herself to be the best weaver in town but having no man in the house to speak for her, was paid the lowest wages for her skills. Now the girl was in love with the mayor's son, a handsome lad whom all the young girls were smitten with, and he with her, but the boy's mother and father felt that the daughter of a widow was a poor match for him and so made it plain that only a girl they deemed worthy of their son would marry him. That year the mayor had decided it had come time to choose a wife for the boy, and the choice would be made at the annual festival for it was a grand affair that saw wealthy merchants and their families from all over come to trade and barter for the cloth that the townspeople had produced over the previous seasons. He turned one of the games at the fair into a contest, setting a challenge that the girl who—"

"Wait a minute," Aeris blurted out, interrupting Tifa mid-sentence. "The fairy queen wears a golden flower in her hair, not a white one." She recited from memory a passage from one of the stories _she_ loved best, "'And when the sun was high in the sky, she caught a ray of golden light and cupped it gently in her hands. And a bright, golden flower came into being in the palm of her hand and ever after, she wore it in her hair.' That's from "The Five Sisters of Mist Valley", but there are other stories that say that she wears the golden flower."

Tifa looked back over the page. "No, it says it right here." She pointed a finger to the sentence and read again, "The flower pure and white as the driven snow."

"Is the story a retelling of another one?" Aeris asked, perplexed.

"I don't think so," Tifa replied. "It's from the book I picked up a few weeks ago. The title's "Tales from the Campfire: A Collection of the Earliest Known Stories of the Fey."

"Earliest?" she repeated. "That can't be right."

"Some stories say white, some say gold." Zack, hunched over an axe he was grinding with a sharpening stone, shrugged his shoulders as if to say, 'Females'. "What does it matter? It's just a flower. And these are just stories about fairies. Hardly something anyone should be overly concerned about if the color of a flower isn't always the same."

"It's confusing," Aeris persisted. "Whoever writes these stories down should do their research and stick to the telling that was told first. It makes things more consistent…and believable."

"Well, the stories are likely taken from different parts of the world." Zack set the stone down on the bench and inspected the edge of the axe's blade closely. "I doubt we all tell the exact same stories. I mean, where is Mist Valley? Not around here."

"Perhaps," she conceded just a little. "But remember—Mist Valley was no longer hidden from the sun after the fairy queen's visit. And that doesn't change the fact that many of the same fairies appear in a lot of the stories. The older ones mostly. Which means that those stories, at least, probably do share a common history, maybe a location or ancestry. And if they're not from the same areas, why, that only gives us all the more reason to pass them down as they were first told if different people from different places had seen and reported the same things. They're evidence, if you will, that there is some truth to the old stories which makes changing things just because we want to…wrong."

"That's just how it is, though," Zack countered. "If someone sees a chance to make some gil from rewriting a story, they'll do it. There is no rule that says they can't. Happens all the time. Heck of a lot easier than making up a whole new story if you ask me. Hell, maybe I should give it a try myself. I could pick a story and just mix things up a bit." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I'd put aside some key characters and plots, and bring in some old ones that didn't get enough attention the first time around and expand their roles, make the story be about them, and see if I can't make some gil off of it. Maybe I can create some new characters and problems too while I'm at it."

Aeris frowned at him. "Such a viewpoint is vexing in the extreme."

"But we wouldn't have problems like wondering where we'll be able to dig our next well hanging over our heads if I was successful," he pointed out pragmatically. "We'd be able to buy the fancy equipment that the big cities have and no farm out here would ever have to worry about water again."

"You do realize that if that were to happen as often as you say it does, most of the stories we know now probably wouldn't exist because they would have changed with each telling. We would be hard put to find just _one_ story that all three of us heard as children and have in common now."

"Can't see how that would be much of a loss."

"It would be to me," Aeris said softly.

"But he's right." Tifa was unable to hide her amusement at seeing her housemates who were normally thick as thieves arguing over stories. "And most stories don't really stay the same anyway. Besides, we wouldn't have new stories to read if all we had are the old stories."

Aeris couldn't dispute what her friend had said. Still, there was a great difference between telling a new story and retelling an old one and carelessly passing it off as the story that came first, which was both dishonest and completely unnecessary. "Tifa, not you too. Do you always have to take his side in everything?"

"Not always," the other girl muttered.

Zack laughed. "That's because I _am_ always right. As with everything else, change is needed to keep up with the times. In stories, it makes things more interesting and more relevant for each generation that comes after. How boring and unimaginative would it be if the stories being told now haven't changed at all from when they were told to our great-great-great-grandparents. We wouldn't be able to relate to any of them."

"I like to think that language may change and evolve over time and therefore the stories do as well, but at their core they haven't changed very much," Aeris said. "Essentially they've remained the same—in spirit, in the lessons they teach, in the morals and values of the people of their day and as intended by those who first told them. They're still present and are still being conveyed today. Change can be good. But there are some things that shouldn't be muddled with." She cast her eyes downward to the floor and concluded quietly, "Not everything needs change. Sometimes we love things the way they are and making them even a little different can take away from them. It can only hurt them in our eyes."

"Not mine. I'd still read them." Tifa waved her hand dismissively. "The more changes, the better. Can I get back to the story now? You know it's my favorite and I haven't read it in a long time—that's why I snapped up the book when I saw it. I love it when all the other spears begin breaking and falling apart as each girl gets ready to take her turn or the wind would suddenly turn the spears back onto the crowds and cause all kinds of mayhem at the fair. I think the fairy queen was ever so much more helpful and kind in this story than she was in some of the others." She giggled. "I want to get to the part where the blacksmith's daughter throws the spear so far, no one sees where it lands and the townspeople have to spend the rest of the day looking for it."

"I think I've heard this one before," Zack said. "Doesn't the fairy queen fix it so that they later find the spear in a gold mine?"

Tifa nodded. "They find it embedded in what looks like a great big stone in a cave, but the mayor recognizes what it really is. Which, much to his dismay, meant that the widow's daughter would soon be swimming in gold and so he declares that she alone is worthy of his son." She smiled with excitement. "I've been looking forward to reading it again."

But that was exactly her point, Aeris thought sadly. Would her friend still love the old tale as much if someone had come along and retold it in such a fashion that the blacksmith's daughter had spotted the young prince riding into town on his white horse just as she was being handed a spear, and deliberately threw it into the ground at her feet? For upon seeing the prince, she'd had a change of heart and decided she didn't want to marry the mayor's son whom she'd thought she'd loved, but instead wanted to marry the new young man because he was handsome and charming and a prince. Despite what Tifa claimed to believe, Aeris had a feeling she wouldn't be nearly as immune as she thought if such drastic changes were made to her favorite story.


	8. Chapter 8

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Eight**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"A gil for your thoughts?"

She'd found Zack inside the garden, elbows resting on top of the fence as he gazed out over the hills. He turned now at the sound of her voice, a broad smile on his handsome face under the twilight sky.

"One day," he said as he made a wide sweeping arc with his arm that encompassed the land at his back. "All of this will be farmland. When more people begin coming out here, we will have better equipment for drilling."

"That would be wonderful." Aeris moved to stand beside him at the fence and laced her fingers behind her back. From their vantage point they could see barns and farmhouses scattered across the hills on both sides of the stream, plumes of smoke coming from the chimneys. A brown dot hovered over the landscape in the distance—a paper kite flying over the Franklins' farm, the end of its string in all likelihood wrapped around a small fist belonging to the youngest boy who'd just been let out from his lessons or chores by his mother, accompanied by the faint barking of a dog trailing his heels. Much farther down the dirt road Aeris traveled every day, a cloud of dust was slowly moving toward the bridge—a farmer coming home late with his cattle. "We won't have to worry about digging when drills can go so much deeper."

"So you've finally come 'round to my way of thinking, I see," he teased.

She shook her head, smiling. "I wouldn't go that far."

Zack's face turned somber. "I can see it now. The land settled by people as it was meant to be. You and me together. Along with Tifa, with all of us working together," he looked back out at the hills, his voice softening, "these hills will finally fulfill the promise our folks first saw in them. The promise we still see in them."

Aeris felt the first fluttering of unease stir in the pit of her stomach. "The hills don't owe us anything," she admonished him gently.

"No," he said. "I only mean to say that we will never give up on them."

She knew of his devotion to the hills all too well, a sentiment echoed by many other farmers, and which defined all those who chose to remain behind. "It's time to come in for dinner. Tifa has fresh squeezed orange juice and she says she'll drink the whole jug if we're not back by the time she counts to ten."

"Ten!" He looked aghast. "Aeris, why didn't you say anything!"

He grabbed her hand and made for the house.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"It's nice here," Aeris sighed in contentment, tracing circles on his chest. She could feel the heat of his body through the thin material of her blouse, and under her ear, the rhythm of his heart beating loud and strong as the rushing water near where they lay under the branches of a giant ash tree. Her hand drifted downward, but all she felt was warm, smooth skin and sleek, powerful muscles. It was as if the flesh there had never been punctured by sharp metal and torn open, and she gave a silent prayer of thanks that the hunter hadn't been using a rifle.

"Enjoy it while you can." His voice was a low murmur just above her ear. "The stream may not be this way for much longer."

"What do you mean?" She brought her head up to look at him. "Surely, you're not saying that it's going to dry up?"

"In the east, the river is changing. If the humans building their new towns up north continue to migrate westward and dump their wastes into the water, it soon won't be fit for anything to live in."

"You mean it will become like the river?" she asked fearfully. "It will get dirty and murky, and everything that lives in it will die?"

Cloud's gaze did not waver. Very slowly he gave a nod.

"We're to blame, aren't we? The river dying, the wells drying up. That's what you meant when you said your kind watch us to protect the earth. We're the ones destroying it."

His lack of a reply was answer enough.

"It's not that bad, is it? The stream's still clean...there's still hope."

He shifted beside her and she moved a little to take some of her weight from his chest. "The stream is clean because it enters the forest directly from the mountains and no humans come into touch with it until it comes out into the hills. Few people these days would probably know it, but the path through the forest goes northeast, not due north as it's often said in the towns and cities along the coast." He hesitated, and she nodded quickly to show she was following him. "The people who first came out here were also from the east. South of where we are, the stream is not like it is up here."

Hearing him speak of regions beyond the hills and forests raised other questions. "How do you know what it's like so far down south?"

"Fairies don't just live in these parts. We have kin in the hills and mountains far from here. And like humans, we move and travel too."

"You've seen the ocean," she breathed, momentarily forgetting what they'd been discussing. Like fairies, she'd only heard about it in stories and had never thought she would see either one. "You've been there. Is it really as big as they say it is? Bigger than the hills?"

"Much, much bigger. Almost as big as the sky. It looks like it touches the sky all around. Picture the hills but replace it with water."

To her, the hills were endless, so much so that a body of water even bigger than them seemed an impossibility when water was the one thing that was always in limited supply.

His eyes appeared an equally endless blue, and were filled with all the things she'd always thought were impossible, things that somehow seemed possible when she looked into those infinite blue pools looking back at her at that very moment. "You should also see the mountains. They're so tall they disappear into the sky," he said, his eyes practically glowing. Aeris' breath caught in her throat; inasmuch as she'd thought Zack's love for the hills defined him, she sensed that the same was true for the fairy, but on a larger scale. There was something about the way he often spoke of the world that told her clearly of the significance it held for him, and how integral it was to who he was. "Or at least they look like they do. I've never seen anything to rival them. I wish you could see them too."

As quickly as the awe had come, it evaporated. Aeris dropped her gaze. "Of course you've been to many different places."

There was a pause. "That's not the only way we learn about other places. We also find out a lot about what's going on from the forest itself—the trees, the plants, the animals, they're all alive." He tipped his head slightly toward the branches of the ash tree that hung low all about them, nearly enclosing them, as they had done for him once when he'd been wounded.

"You can communicate with nature." She had heard him mention their ties to the planet before but hadn't understood exactly what that entailed, and this new information only underscored the differences between them.

"That's as good a word as any to describe it, I suppose," Cloud said. "But it's a little more complicated than that. There is a connection between all living things and the planet. The connection between fairies and the world around us is on a much deeper level than others, almost like a sacred trust, or pact. We think of it as being part of a mutually beneficial relationship, where it provides us with everything we need to survive and gives us the gift of the fairies which humans call 'immortality', and we, in turn, take care of it. We do what we can to help it but we try not to interfere with other forms of life."

"Even if it means nothing will be able to live in the river anymore?" Aeris asked carefully, bringing the conversation back around to her more immediate concern. But there was nothing in his face that revealed if her words had had any effect on him. She looked away again, feeling disconsolate. "So there is no hope then."

"I didn't say that," his voice came, unexpected but welcomed, and putting her mind at ease. "There is always hope."

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"…they delight in mischief. It is the only emotion they're capable of experiencing on their own." Letty paused, her eyes lighting upon a pair of ewes nibbling at the same patch of clover. Lucy and Daisy hovered close by, hackles raised, distrustful of the new stranger in their midst, but doing their best not to give in to their natural instinct and go on the attack. "When the world of fairy intersects with ours, it is always through the doing of a fairy bent on mischief. You can bet your sheep on that."

Aeris glanced up from admiring the fine purple needles of the thistle she'd plucked from the path of a young lamb as she listened to her neighbor giving various accounts of fairies doing what they did best, which, in Letty's opinion, was making mischief. Ivan's wife had a reputation for being a fountain of knowledge when it came to anything to do with the hills, and had a tendency to want to share all she knew with any acquaintance lucky enough to pass her way. As it had happened, she'd been outside hanging the wash when she'd spotted Aeris' flock and had decided to come visit with her for a bit and maybe soak up some sun while they enjoyed a nice little chat.

"Always?" she asked cautiously.

"Always," the older woman informed her tartly. "And there is nothing they like more than stealing little ones from their cradles and replacing them with changelings. Why, if you take your eyes off a young'un for even a moment, they'll snatch 'em from your doorstep!"

"Surely they're not all like that."

"It's in the stories. Why else are they still being told and we still hear of it happening now and then?"

Perhaps the reason why the stories were abound with fairies stealing babies was because humans were so fascinated with them, Aeris thought silently. But she held her tongue and decided to humor the other woman. "I am neither a babe nor a young child. I hold no temptation for them."

"Don't be too sure about that." The stout, blond Letty's cheeks were flushed a rosy pink at having such an attentive audience on this fine day. "Fairies are unpredictable and uncivilized. They don't have feelings the way humans do and covet them. It's best we be careful not to become too caught up in the magic of their existence lest they snatch ours."

"Our feelings?" she asked.

"Our ability to feel," Letty said, a speculative gleam in her eyes. "And us." She let out a sigh and said heavily, "I worry about those of you out in the fields on your own all day."

Aeris smiled. "We're safe enough out here. I don't think I've ever heard of a child that went missing in these hills."

"Can't say I've heard it myself but that don't mean it can't happen," Letty replied. "Your young man is proof of that."

She stiffened. "Excuse me?"

"Zack." Pale brows rose in inquiry. "As my Anna tells it, he has a soft spot for you and Tifa, does he not? The poor dear. She was flabbergasted when she found out. _Flabbergasted_, I tell you."

Aeris was at a loss for words.

Letty's warm brown eyes twinkled. "But that's not what we were talking about. Zack's been telling the men that he thinks there's something to the stories."

"Oh," she said, flustered. "Has he?"

Letty's head bobbed up and down enthusiastically. "Ivan himself has been talking about finding a fairy." Among the farmers, Ivan was the last man that anybody would expect to find taking part in a serious conversation about fairies or the rest of their ilk. He was as levelheaded and practical as his wife was superstitious, and didn't put much stock in the tales that all his neighbors seemed to live by. Despite that, Ivan had always indulged his wife's love of talking a person's ears off, particularly his ears, although he rarely paid any mind to what was being said. But judging from what Letty was now telling Aeris, it appeared she may have finally gotten through to her husband. "He thinks we can probably get it to work with us if we can just catch it," she confessed.

Aeris eyed her warily. "Letty, you're not serious? Ivan wouldn't really try to find a fairy, would he?"

"Of course not, dearie," Letty laughed. "But we should always keep our eyes and ears open, and be on the lookout for things that might be of a...shall we say, _suspicious_ nature, when we're out here by ourselves. You never know who, or what, might be watching us."

"Right," Aeris murmured. "I'll remember that.


	9. Chapter 9

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Nine**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

With a grunt of effort, Aeris hoisted herself up onto the next branch and quickly grabbed hold of a smaller one beside her head. She took several deep breaths.

"Wait!" she gasped. "Slow down please!"

The fairy turned to look back down at her. Fair eyebrows shot up at seeing how far below she was on the tree from him.

"I need to stop and rest," she said, feeling foolish and a complete failure. She was already breathing hard and perspiring from their race through the woods, and he'd picked the tallest tree in sight to climb. He could run like the wind and only slowed his pace once he saw that holding her hand and pulling her along was not very conducive to getting her to move any faster, and now he was climbing the tree as if he was walking on flat ground and not even breaking a sweat.

"I must leave soon and I want to get to the top before I have to take you back to the sheep. We're only about halfway up."

Aeris blew out her breath and let her head drop in exhaustion. From where she was perched on a thick, sturdy bough jutting out midway up the tree trunk, she could already see the tops of various trees around them. "I'm not a fairy. I'm not as strong as you and I can't climb very fast."

There was a slight disturbance in the air around her and his voice was suddenly coming from very close. "Let me help you."

She brought her head up, surprised to see him standing on the same tree limb as her but farther out, perfectly balanced on the uneven, knobby wood with both his arms hanging free at his side.

He extended a hand toward her. "There's nothing to fear."

Tentatively, Aeris released the death grip she had on the branch above them with her right hand and grabbed it. He yanked her forward with a force that ripped her other hand from the branch, and she let out a shriek as both her feet slipped and would've taken a nosedive but a pair of arms lifted her easily against a bare chest.

"Cloud!" She threw her arms around his neck. "You caught me! I thought I was going to fall!"

She got her breath back only to lose it again with his next words. "I would never let you fall."

Her pounding heart beat even faster. He suddenly rose from the tree, and she quickly squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in his neck. Wind whipped at her skin and through her hair, and twigs and leaves brushed against her clothes, and she shivered and pressed closer into the reassuring warmth of his body.

All of a sudden, everything seemed to stop, including the wind itself.

"I think it's safe for you to look now."

Was that laughter she heard in his voice? Aeris pulled back to look at him and immediately forgot where they were. That was definitely amusement she saw lurking in those blue depths that were looking darker and warmer at the moment than she'd ever seen them.

"We're at the top," Cloud said, causing her arms to tighten instinctively about his neck. They were standing above the forest canopy that lay spread out before them like a great green carpet. Nearby, birds flitted over their nests while the cries of nestlings filled the air and where the trees were hemmed in by their borders, she could see the hills. They really did appear endless, going on and on for miles, until they faded into the horizon.

"You're looking the wrong way."

She wouldn't let go of him as she craned her neck to see over her own shoulder and he obliged her by turning around. It occurred to her that the branches at the top of a tree couldn't possibly support both their weight, but the thought fled her mind as her mouth dropped open.

The forest stretched even farther to the north but past that were more hills and beyond that rose great majestic peaks blanketed in white.

"That's not…?"

Aeris felt him nod. "It is," he replied. "Snow."

"Snow…" Her fingers curled in involuntary reflex.

She couldn't tear her eyes from the misty snow-capped peaks. They were so enormous, they completely dwarfed the much smaller mounds at their feet, and some were so tall their tops disappeared into the clouds. Just as he'd said.

"Mountains…"

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"Where do those keep coming from?" Tifa asked.

Aeris' head came up, her eyes going straight to the vase of wild lilies that Tifa was staring at.

Tifa had the oddest feeling that the other girl was struggling for an answer to give as she entered her room and went to sit with her on the bed.

"What are you looking at?" she asked, turning both their attention to the slender volume Aeris had been perusing.

Without a word she held it out, and Tifa saw at a glance what it was. The small leather-bound journal had belonged to Aeris' mother and was one of her friend's most treasured possessions.

"What's that in your hand?"

Aeris hesitated before opening her fingers to reveal a small white teardrop shape that looked like it was made of a very fine, thin layer of velvet and appeared as fragile as a snowflake.

"A petal?"

"The flowers are a little too big to fit inside the book," Aeris confessed.

"So you pressed the petals," Tifa deduced. "I don't think I've ever seen you bringing them home but each time I come in here, that vase has grown bigger."

Aeris' brows knitted together, confused as to where Tifa was going with the conversation.

"I remember how you used to pick them all the time for Mary," Tifa went on, her eyes returning to the vase sitting on Aeris' dressing table. "Her face would just light up whenever you came through the door with the flowers in your arms. She would always start off placing them in her favorite vase on the kitchen table. Remember?" Her voice turned wistful. "If you brought more flowers home before they dried out, the vase would get too full so she'd start putting them in whatever she could find and place them in every room until the whole house was soon overflowing with flowers. Bless her, she was such a dear, sweet woman."

"She couldn't bear to throw them out before they died." Aeris smiled fondly as she recalled the kindly old woman who had opened her home, and her heart, to both girls when they'd lost their families. "Neither could my mother. They both loved the flowers, too."

Tifa was silent for the space of a few heartbeats. "Is that why you stopped bringing them home?"

Aeris nodded.

"But you've been picking them again."

"Yes," Aeris said with a quickness that made Tifa immediately suspicious. Ashamed for doubting her friend, she tried to brush it aside.

"Oh." She smiled brightly. "I don't see you bringing them home."

"I—I only pick one sometimes on my way home," Aeris stammered. "You know how long they can last if they're placed in water. That's why I…keep them in the vase in here. So they can live as long as possible."

"Of course…"

But Tifa could not suppress the nagging feeling that Aeris was hiding something.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~oooooo~~~<strong>

The next morning, Aeris found a water lily on her bedroom window.

She made quick work of the warm cereal that Tifa had prepared and set out on the table for her, and hurried out to the barn to help Zack finish milking the cow. Once she drove the sheep to a new meadow with enough grass to keep them busy for a while, she headed for the old wagon trail.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"That's a pretty flower," Zack said, looking at the flower tucked behind Aeris' ear. "It looks very…" he gestured to the white lily, and finished rather awkwardly, "pretty on you."

Aeris' eyebrows rose. "You're losing your touch."

He laughed, but he felt a strange heat rise in his face. "Let me try that again," he said, striving for the confidence and ease that had always come so naturally to him. "What I was trying to say is, you look lovely today… The flower suits you, Aeris. You look like you were born to wear it."

He saw her eyes widen slightly, but she only smiled and went to the pump to wash her hands.

"What's wrong? Did I stumble over that one, too?"

"Of course not," she answered over her shoulder. "That was very well done, as expected of someone as skilled as you."

Daisy and Lucy trotted up to him and sat down on their hindquarters, tails flickering like flames as they waited for their turn to be complimented by the one whom they knew was a master at the art of flattering females.

Zack chuckled. "Yeah, yeah, you both look very pretty today too." He scratched their heads affectionately. "I hear you're learning to be a bit nicer to the neighbors now. Never thought that was gonna happen. Keep up the good work, will ya?"

They looked reproachfully at him, completely unimpressed with his less than stellar attempt at praise. Zack was duly chastened. "Your beauty would put a queen to shame. Certainly no other female can compare to either of you."

"I heard that."

He glanced back at the green-eyed brunette brushing back the wispy brown curls that the wind seemed set on blowing out of place. _Her_ beauty was truly incomparable. "Except for maybe one."

An indignant harrumph came from his left. "_Excuse_ me?"

"Or two," he said, quickly and smoothly, as though he'd intended to say just that all along. Now that was much more to his usual standards, he thought, silently applauding himself on the way he'd covered himself that time. "You didn't give me a chance to finish." He shot a reproving look at their housemate who had come from the barn and was standing by the woodpile, arms folded across her chest, glaring at him.

A peal of merry laughter rang out from Aeris.

Zack grinned ruefully at her. "Why does she look like she doesn't she believe me?"

"Oh, Zack." Aeris grinned back, her eyes lit with laughter. "You've had it far too easy with the girls. You're just too handsome and charming for your own good sometimes."

"Handsome and charming, is it?" he asked curiously. "I'll take that."

She giggled as she picked up her basket and staff, and headed for the house. "You can't trust a man with such a glib tongue. As soon as you turn your back, he's off sweet-talking the next available girl like there's no tomorrow."

"Isn't that the truth," said Tifa in a tone of disgruntlement.

"Hey now," Zack said. "I just like to be nice to everybody. Girls in particular." He winked at his loyal hounds. "Especially the faithful ones. Can't help it if they like being nice back to me." If he'd thought to get a rise from his companions, he'd thought wrong. They had already moved on from the topic and left him in the dust.

"I like the flower in your hair, Aeris," Tifa was saying to her as she passed by her.

"What, this?" Aeris patted the lily nonchalantly. "It's nothing."

"You used to do that a lot, didn't you? I remember now. I always thought it was so pretty." Tifa was hot on her heels. "Has something happened? Is there a reason why you're wearing them in your hair again?"

She didn't see the look on Aeris' face before she smiled and shook her head. But Zack did.

His eyes followed the girls chatting gaily as they walked inside the house.

"What was that about?" he asked himself. Why had Aeris looked almost frightened there for a moment? Tifa had simply made an observation about how she'd used to wear the flowers in her hair.

Lucy and Daisy were still sitting at his feet, their eyes knowing, full of things they'd seen and heard, and quite possibly, wanted to share. Or maybe he was just imagining things.

But his gut was telling him otherwise.

"I wonder," Zack mused, gazing into the soulful amber eyes of both dogs, "what stories you would tell."


	10. Chapter 10

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Ten**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

There were days when he would take her into the forest.

Most days, however, saw them out in the fields watching the sheep with the dogs. She never knew how long he would stay and while Aeris understood that he had responsibilities in the fairy world, she still felt bereft whenever he had to leave and always thought that their time together was too short.

There were also days when no flower appeared in the morning and her sadness would linger throughout the day and she could only be grateful that it was seldom he was not able to come at all. Alone on those days, she would search for edible plants to bring home and then sit and read a book. Her thoughts would inevitably drift to him, and she would replay in her mind everything he had shown or told her about his world and all the things they'd done together as she relived the joy of being with him.

On one such beautiful afternoon when they were settled in a field far out of the sight of any farm, Aeris was content and happy to watch him play with the dogs. To her delight, she'd discovered early on in their acquaintance that although not often seen, he did indeed have a rather mischievous side to him, and it usually came in the form of teasing the dogs. As was his habit, he'd dropped down onto his haunches and had slowly crept forward, sending the dogs into a state of near frenzied panic as he drew closer and closer to the herd. Daisy was snarling and Lucy was growling, and they were both looking back and forth between the fairy who seemed intent on devouring their sheep and her, their guide, clearly asking if they should bite him. Unfortunately for them, Aeris was occupied with rolling on the ground with laughter, hands clutching her waist and gasping for air, and was no help to them whatsoever. Left without any other recourse, they launched themselves at the fairy and in a flash, had Cloud on the ground and were determinedly licking their wayward friend into submission, ignoring his struggles and yelps of surrender while Aeris dissolved into more helpless laughter.

It took some time before she was able to stop laughing enough to pull her herself together and took her seat again on a large jagged rock sticking partway out of the grassy slope. There she sat, fixing her hair and clothes and watching as he finally fought the dogs off of him.

"When are you going to learn?" she chortled gleefully, still wiping tears of mirth from her eyes as he came toward her, smelling like the air on a cool spring morning despite just having been given a tongue bath from two overly adoring dogs.

"Never," the fairy declared. "Just you watch, give it a few more weeks and I'll be carrying off the whole flock from right under their noses."

"All of them at once?" she teased. "That I have to see."

"You don't think I can do it?" His face was completely serious.

Her laughter subsided. She knew he wasn't given to boasting, particularly not of feats he couldn't accomplish. "No," she said honestly. "I _know_ you can do it."

"I can't."

She swallowed a stunned laugh. "Cloud!" Biting her inner cheek to keep from bursting into another fit of giggles, she scolded him, "You're terrible."

One corner of his lips quirked up but he made no further reply as he joined her on the rock. Aeris studied him from beneath her eyelashes, marveling at his profile and at how every moment with him seemed to be filled with beauty and magic even when they were simply sitting side-by-side, watching the world in silence as the sun rose or sank back down over the hills.

"You're staring," he said, without taking his eyes off a sheep showing her lamb the best plants to eat.

Her face flamed at having been caught gawking at him again but she also felt a rush of pleasure at seeing the light blush on his cheekbones. "It's just that…" she began haltingly, "It's still a little hard to believe. Cloud."

He turned his face to hers and she was struck with a sudden sense of shyness as that bright, piercing gaze focused solely on her.

"Are you real? Is this real?"

A hint of a smile appeared on his lips again. Her heart missed a beat.

"Haven't we been through this before?" he asked.

"I guess I'm still afraid you might not be real."

He took her hand and tugged her forward. She forgot to breathe as his eyes roved over her face in a manner almost like he was searching for something. A hand lifted, hard knuckles brushing a stray curl off her cheek as he lowered his head and she lifted her face to meet his.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"The well's going dry," Zack said that night while they were sitting at the table after dinner. "Tifa says she has to bring the pail up half a dozen times just to fill up the bucket now. I don't know what's going to happen to us when the pump out front goes too. And we've got two more families that need new wells!"

"You had no luck with the well at Ben's?" she asked even though it was painfully obvious what the answer was going to be. It was getting worse by the day, and it was the same story with most of the wells on the other farms.

Zack let out a sigh and shook his head. Aeris watched a large hand, tanned by the sun and rough from working in the fields, rake through the thick black hair that he used to wear slicked back but had taken on a shaggy, messier look the past year with the way he'd been combing his hands through it whenever he was worried. It gave him a more virile, manly appearance, and the local farmers' daughters gathered around him like bees buzzing around a honeycomb. "No," he said with another small shake of his head. "We can't get anything down there."

"Oh." She bit her lip, uncertain. "What about Ian's farm?"

"The boys there say it'll be another day or so then they can begin putting down the foundations."

"Well, there's that at least," she said with an encouraging smile.

"I haven't been able to do more than muck around a bit on the far side of the garden. I thought we'd have more time before we'd be back to work on another farm." It seemed like every other week, another well ran dry and another family was left without access to one of the most basic needs for survival. The wells were going too fast when they were supposed to last for decades, not simply a few years.

"There's a chance we might not need a new well if the old one goes," Aeris said, trying to find a bright side to their situation. She knew that their water well was on its last legs and would eventually have to be boarded up and sealed off as nearly half of the farm wells had been thus far. "None of us have had a problem with our pumps. As long as we have that, we may not need a new well."

"Some of the men are talking about digging through the bedrock and water table instead of finding another spot to dig again."

Aeris felt the color drain from her face. "No." She shook her head and said adamantly, "_No._ Absolutely not. You've gotten too far down there in that hole. It's too dangerous—we can't risk it. Not again."

Two previous attempts had been beyond catastrophic when all the vibrations from the men chipping away at the rock had sent the walls crumbling, burying the workers inside the wells. They just didn't have the proper tools out in the hills for drilling through such unstable rock.

She stared at his hard face. "Zack, you musn't! You can't let them!"

"I know that," he said in frustration. "We all know. But we're desperate. Even Ned thinks it's better than the alternative. He offered to trade spots with one of us if we decide to do it. Liam stays, though." Farmer Ned's eldest boy had been one of the men lost when the second well had collapsed but apparently he was in favor of trying again. But in addition to Liam, who had taken his brother's place working with their father, he and his wife did have four more young mouths to feed and it couldn't be easy waiting for their turn.

"We are not going to die of hunger or thirst," Aeris said, trying to hide her own concern. "There has to be another way."

"I don't know," Zack sighed. "I said I'd take care of you both. I promised I would but…" he opened his hands on the table, palms faced up in a sign of helplessness. "I can't. Water is in short supply and I just don't know what to do. What would Father and Mother say?"

"It's not your fault," Aeris said sternly. "The three of us are in this together. All of us, _all_ the farms."

"But I promised them I'd take care of you girls and the farm—"

"We all made the same promise. We're together and we're looking out for each other. We're doing our best and that's all we can do."

"But it's not enough, Aeris," Zack said, unconvinced. "I'm the man of the family. I should know what to do. I should be able to find an answer."

"Zack, your mother and father never meant for you to shoulder all the responsibility. They wanted us to take care of each other and we are. Don't be so hard on yourself. Good things do happen. Think about that and dwell less on the bad. We know that there's water—that's all that matters. And slowly but surely, we're getting our wells dug."

"I don't want to lose any more families to the cities. These hills are our home. We belong here."

"We'll find a way," she said. "We'll find something." Aeris reached across the table and covered his hands with hers. "Something will happen. Something will come. I know it. We are not going to be forced to move away from here. Whatever it takes, we will not leave the hills."

"Zack? Aeris?"

Tifa was standing in the doorway behind them, the same worried look on her face as Zack that told them she'd been listening to their conversation.

"Tifa…" Zack glanced uneasily at Aeris. "Sorry, we were talking."

"I heard." Tifa smiled, but the smile didn't quite reach her eyes. "One of you gonna be helping me tonight?"

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"How are Aeris and Zack?"

Tifa squinted at the dark-haired girl standing in the morning sunlight as she finished wiping her flour-covered hands on her apron. She'd been heading outside to check on the animals when she saw Fanny and her cousins, Elias and Jana, climbing the hill toward the house.

"They're fine," she replied, stepping out of the house. "Zack's at work on Ben's farm with the other men and Aeris is out with the sheep," she said for the second time that day, knowing full well that Francesca, or Fanny as everyone called her, already knew that little tidbit of information herself, as had her earlier visitor, Anna. Tifa turned to the young girl at Fanny's side with a big smile. "Goodness, Jana, you're getting so tall!" she exclaimed to Jana who grinned hugely. "I can hardly recognize you. You're going to be taller than everybody here soon if you don't stop growing!"

"Aeris is out with the sheep?" Fanny sounded puzzled. "That's strange… We passed by your sheep on the way here and didn't see her."

Tifa swiveled back around to face her. "What did you say?"

"It might not have been your sheep," Jana said, giving her older cousin a look that did not slip by Tifa. "You know you always get everybody's animals mixed up. It might've even been the O'Riley's herd we saw."

Tifa looked skeptically at the bright-eyed young child gazing innocently up at her. Everyone knew everyone else's farm animals in the hills. And unless Fanny had mistaken a herd of cows for a flock of sheep, it was very unlikely she would've thought the O'Riley herd was their sheep.

"She thought your sheep were our goats last week!" Jana said, eyes twinkling as though she'd read Tifa's thoughts. "Isn't that right, Fanny? We had a good laugh about it with Aeris."

"Um, y-yeah," Fanny stammered, her pretty face pink. "Aunt Tabitha says we should see about gettin' spectacles for me when we go to town… B-but I don't really think I need them," she added hastily. "They'd only get in my way."

Her cousin rolled her eyes. "Fanny ran ahead of me and Elias when she saw some of your sheep at the top of a hill and thought they were our goats that had got away. The dogs were barking like mad before we even got close and Aeris ran up to us, wondering why we were trying to bring home your sheep." Jana shook her head and said with a giggle, "And Fanny wonders why Ma's always frettin' that she'll chop off her own hand one of these days. But Fanny just won't listen. I tell Ma Fanny'll just have to learn her lesson the hard way. I don't think she'll care so much about looking pretty anymore when she's only got one hand. Unless she sees Zack, o' course."

"Jana!"

"Did you see Lucy or Daisy around?" Tifa asked anxiously. "Maybe something happened to Aeris, and the dogs are out there, not knowing what to do."

"Yeah, we saw both of them," Elias spoke up, coming to stand between his little sister and their cousin with the basket of eggs he'd collected from the chicken coop. Looking at them standing side-by-side, Tifa thought it was almost uncanny how the three of them had the exact same brown hair and gray eyes as well as the same nose. It was no wonder strangers often thought Fanny's aunt was her mother when the two of them went into town for supplies. "Lucy and Daisy would've been howlin', I'll bet, if anything had happened to Aeris. You know better than us how loyal they are to her." Elias gave Tifa a reassuring smile. "I'm sure the sheep are safe, Tifa."

That was true enough, Tifa supposed. With Daisy and Lucy around, the only potential danger the sheep faced was wandering away from the rest of the flock and getting lost. "She was probably on the ground and we just didn't see her," Elias went on. "When we're out with the goats, we like to dig for roots and whatever we can find… Aeris seems to enjoy that too. A lot of the time, we don't see her until we're about to trip over her."

"She just pops out of nowhere," Jana said. "Fanny almost jumped out of her skin the first time it happened."

"Gave me a fright, she did," Fanny admitted. "I swear I was looking right where she was standing. Only she _wasn't_ there, and then suddenly she was. "

Tifa gave her a funny look. "That's…odd."

"Oh, no, no, it wasn't anything bad," the other girl said with a little laugh of embarrassment. "She laughed. I mean, like Aeris always does, in that cheerful way of hers. She wasn't laughing at me. She's too nice. We_ all_ laughed."

"Maybe we can stop by and visit with her. She's on our way back," Jana said. "I like Aeris. She's so friendly and happy all the time."

"Aunt Tabitha didn't say for us to hurry."

"No, Ma didn't." Jana looked hopefully at her brother.

"I don't see why not," he agreed. "She really does seem to be glowing these days, doesn't she? Whenever we see her, she has the biggest smile on her face."

"Sometimes, when she doesn't know she's being watched, I almost think she looks sad. Like she's lonely or something." Jana's eyebrows were furrowed in thought, a look of intense concentration on her small face. "But as soon as she sees you, she's smiling. She's the happiest person I know."

A fresh wave of doubt rose in the back of Tifa's mind. "That's Aeris for you," she said slowly. "She always has a smile for everyone."

"So," Fanny said brightly. "About Zack… You said he's at Tim's farm?"

Tifa had to fight the urge to roll her eyes like Jana was doing again. That was the real question Fanny had been working around to from the beginning even though she'd already known the answer. But she was hoping Tifa would offer more information, not necessarily about the job but the man himself. Like Ivan and Letty's daughter with the squash she'd departed with earlier that morning, Fanny had simply used the eggs as an excuse to visit the farm with her cousins. Still, she was a very nice, likable girl and Tifa felt a special kinship with the girl who had been orphaned when her entire family had been struck down by the same illness that had taken both of Tifa and Aeris' parents.

"No. They're at Old Ben's. Ned's group is at the Whitleys'."

"Oh, is it Ben's turn already?" Fanny exclaimed, cheeks flushed with excitement. "That's good to hear."

"Fanny, they've been there for a while now. Don't you remember I told you that already?" Jana asked in a tone of exasperation. "That's all Philip keeps talkin' about—he got to help them out a bit when they were working at the well on his family's farm and now he's been bitten by the bug. He thinks he'll be big enough to join them next year."

"Oh, that's right," Fanny said. "I did forget. How is he—How are they coming along?"

Wonderful, Tifa thought with a silent groan. Thanks a lot, Zack.

It was always the same: from the moment she and Aeris had arrived on the farm, they'd seen the effect the older boy had on their neighbors' daughters. In fact, it had become somewhat of a running joke in the hills shortly after Zack had seemingly shot up overnight and every female between the ages of one and one hundred had sat up and taken notice that a young girl's rite of passage into adulthood was not complete until she had been through the experience of having a crush on the handsome black-haired, blue-eyed boy who lived on a neighboring farm. Once the running of the farm had been turned over to them, they'd been besieged by young girls with stars in their eyes, running errands to the farm for their family in the hope of running into him and catching his eye.

Unfortunately for them _and_ for Fanny and Anna, Zack had eyes for only one girl.

And Tifa was beginning to suspect that the girl in question had set _her_ sights elsewhere.


	11. Chapter 11

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Eleven**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"This way," Aeris said, moving swiftly through the forest underbrush as Zack followed behind, trying to keep up with her.

His footfalls were fast, if not nearly as silent as hers. "I don't know how you're not getting whiplashes from all these things," he muttered, batting a vine out of his face.

He heard her chuckle. "I do this thing called, "I look where I'm going". You should try it. It really works."

"Yeah, yeah," he grumbled. "I've heard that one before."

She pushed back a clump of brambles hanging from a branch above them and held it back for him with her staff as he came up beside her. "Wrong way," he thought he heard her murmur. She smiled apologetically at him. "Forgot these were here. But now's a good time as any to start learning how to use your eyes. And," she added dryly, "it might prevent you from getting lost next time, if you would remember to keep the boundaries of the forest in sight."

Zack slid a sidelong glance at her. "All right, Tifa. What did you do with Aeris? 'Fess up!"

She laughed as they pressed forward again. "She does have it right, though. Which reminds me, what on earth were you doing this far in the forest?"

"I thought I saw someone. I figured he or she was lost and needed some help. But…they ran away."

"Maybe it was someone hunting."

"No, it looked like a child."

Aeris drew up short and stared at him. "W-what? Who?"

He shook his head in bewilderment. "I've never seen him or her before, I don't think. Black hair. About this long." He brought his hand up to just below his shoulder then down to his chest. "And this tall maybe."

"Anthony? Megan?" Zack could almost see the wheels turning in her head as she cast about for names among their neighbor's children that would fit that description. "Carrie? One of the Franklin boys?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive. They looked…wild."

"Wild?" Her brows knitted in confusion. "You mean, like they were an animal from the wild?"

"I mean, like they weren't wearing much clothing," he clarified.

"They weren't…" she sputtered.

The shock on her face probably mirrored what had been on his. He chuckled as they began moving through the woods once more. "That's why I think I was just seeing things. This place will do that to you. It was strange. Stranger than normal, that is," he amended at the look she gave him. "I called out to whoever it was and I swear, they looked right at me and ran off. I tried to chase them but they were just too fast. When I finally stopped, I realized I was completely lost myself. I didn't know which way I'd come from." A branch suddenly swung back toward him from the shadows all around them, too fast for him to duck in time, and he felt a sharp sting in his jaw. "You agree, don't you, Aeris? I was probably just thinking I saw something, right?"

She seemed startled by the question. "I… Of-of course. What else could it have been?"

Zack shrugged. "A lot of folks would say 'fairies'."

"True." Aeris' face was troubled. "They'd say either that or an illusion," she said with what sounded like forced humor but he tried to tell himself he was imagining that too. "Real or illusion, it would have to be the work of fairies."

"And that's why I asked you," he said lightly. "You're more level-headed than most everyone we know."

Her eyes slid away from his. "You might be surprised."

It was his turn to force a smile. "I've always liked that about you, Aeris. You have a sensible head on your shoulders."

She became noticeably quieter as they forged on again.

Zack didn't like the disturbing thoughts her reaction had roused inside of him. Catching up to her quickly, he tried to ask casually, "How did you find me? How did you even know I was in here?"

"I didn't. I just heard a great deal of thrashing coming from the forest as we were passing by. You're lucky we came back early today or you would've spent the next week in here."

"All the way out there?" He stole a glance at her out of the corner of his eyes and met her laughing gaze.

"At first I thought it was an elephant," she giggled, leaping gracefully onto a slab of stone hidden amongst the undergrowth and creepers right in the middle of their path that he would've tripped over if she hadn't been there to lead the way. "But we don't have elephants so I knew whoever was in here had to be lost."

He winced. "I was caught in this giant trap of vines and brambles." There really hadn't been that many, but he probably shouldn't have tried to walk straight through them.

"And that is why you should use your eyes," his companion said as they came to the end of a row of bushes that still hung heavy with the last of the season's raspberries. "It would've saved you a lot of trouble."

"Say," he said, eyeing the bushes with interest. "Why don't we pick some of these to take home? Tifa would like that."

"Lucy and Daisy are waiting with the sheep," she reminded him. "And I left my basket out there with them anyway."

He nodded curtly. "Fine."

They pushed through a thicket of branches and suddenly found themselves in a meadow, their ability to see their surroundings greatly improved by the sunlight filtering through the more sparse branches over their heads. The sounds and sight of water surging their way greeted them, splashes of white spilling and gushing forth from between great boulders, relentlessly racing southward into the hills.

Aeris lifted her face to the sky and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. A grin tugged at the corners of Zack's mouth as he studied the small smile of pleasure playing about her lips as she felt the sun's warmth on her face. "Well, here we are!" she announced triumphantly, opening her eyes and moving forward. "Why, we're not far from the edge of the woods at all!"

Zack's face jerked to the noisy water up ahead before turning to stare in dumbfounded amazement at the gurgling stream nearer to the clearing where they were standing. He transferred his stunned gaze to Aeris, who had spun back around to face him when she'd heard no response from him.

"How did you know where the stream was?"

Her entire body went stock still.

"I…"

"Aeris?" He took a step toward her and she shrunk back. "How were you able to find the stream so easily?"

Her eyes were huge and dark in her pale face as she stood in the last rays of sunlight, the look on her face reminiscent of a scared animal caught in a trap.

Zack drew in his breath sharply.

"I…I could hear it," she stammered.

"I didn't hear a thing, not until we were just a few yards away."

"I heard you."

He searched her face, doubtful.

"Zack?" She was watching him, her eyes still wary. "Are you all right?"

He didn't know if he quite believed her. There was no question in his mind she'd known exactly where she was going as she'd led him through the forest. She'd moved with a confidence he'd only ever felt in the comfort of their farm; it had never even occurred to him to do anything other than follow her.

"Zack." He heard the concern in her voice as she came toward him, and saw the worry on her face. "You've been hurt." She touched his jaw gently. "Let's go home. I'm sorry."

He suddenly felt every bit of weariness he'd managed to forget while they'd been traipsing through the woods. "Yeah, let's go home," he said tiredly.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

For as long as mankind had been telling stories, fairies had featured in them. Aeris figured then that fairies must predate humans by quite some time. At some point deep in the vaults of history, fairies hadn't been as ambivalent toward humans and sightings of the fairer race had not been as rare as they were now. There had been gatherings where interactions between their peoples had happened, and even liaisons and affairs on occasion. And yet, they'd remained a mystery to humans for thousands of years, and the stories were little more than speculations and wild conjectures for the most part. Fantasy. Humans who'd caught a glimpse of the fey and spun fantastical stories about them, and others who'd heard them and were inspired to expound upon them or fabricate their own tales.

But the reverse was not true. Fairies knew of the ways of humans and were able to speak the languages of the peoples that lived near them. They observed them in their day-to-day life coming and going and a person going about their chores could walk right by one and never know they had just brushed up against a fairy.

"It is forbidden," was all the answer he gave her when she finally put the question to him. "The people don't interact with humans. My mother says that's the way it has to be."

But it hadn't always been so, Aeris knew. Somewhere in both their races' pasts, humans and fairies had been able to come together and take parts in all kinds of festivities and revel in one another's company.

"Why does she say it has to be that way?"

The fairy watching her sheep with her lifted his eyes to hers, but his face was as closed as ever to her. "Because it is for the best."

"But how is it for the best? And why is it forbidden? Who forbids it? Where is it written that we must not see or speak to each other?" she persisted. She'd clearly taken him by surprise as his hand paused in midair with the daisy he'd been about to add to the ones he'd woven meticulously through her hair in an elaborate design that held the thick mass of long brown curls together. Aeris thought it was a shame she would have to undo all his beautiful handiwork again before she went home. "Is it writ in stone, and everything under the sun has to obey it?"

"So many questions," he said with what sounded like amused tolerance. He brought his hand down, gazing at the flower he still held. "It is not our place to ask questions. We just do as we are told."

"But…" She looked at him in confusion. "You're here. With me."

"Yes."

"You don't seem to be the sort that plays tricks on people."

"You've been listening to too many tales."

"So you're not all like that?" she pressed.

"It figures that the stories you've heard are mostly about the fairies who cause mischief—they're the ones humans spot and remember. The rest stay out of sight." Heavy blond lashes lifted, blue eyes meeting hers, but his voice was guarded. "They are but a small segment of our population."

Aeris' shoulders dropped and her eyes fell to the ground. "And the never-ending festivities," she said, her voice hollow. "The feasting and drinking that go on for days and days…"

"Fairies like our food and wine and we will find every excuse to celebrate, but I think our reputation for drinking and feasting…have been slightly exaggerated. Again it is just the few among us who have the fortitude or inclination to indulge in spirits for days on end."

"They are known to toy with human emotions and our affections."

"Not all fairies do." A flower came briefly into her line of vision and she felt his thumb under her chin, tilting her face up gently. "Some of us believe that emotions are the planet's greatest gift and should be handled with the utmost care and respect."

The fear she hadn't wanted to admit to ebbed slightly. "Thank you."

"You're very welcome." She had a sneaking suspicion he was fighting back a grin. But when she searched his face, she saw only what looked like amused tenderness in his eyes. The humor fled from his face as he spoke again, his voice hesitant but sincere. "Aeris…"

"Yes?"

"Even if it _is_ written in stone," he said, tucking the daisy behind her ear. "You and I…" Warm fingers traced the outline of her cheek ever-so-lightly. "We are written in the stars."

She caught his face, pulled him down, and kissed him.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"'For the welts on his back that he received in return for two years of back-breaking work he did for you, for the wages you promised him and which you never intended to pay, for breaking your contract with him for such a minor infraction, you too shall be punished. Reneging on your word, lying and cheating him out of the gil he's earned a hundred times over, scheming to let his family starve while you lived off of the labor their son provided, rewarding him thusly rather than with the praise and gratitude he deserves and which _you _owe him… For all of that and more you will join what you deem to be among the lowest forms of life and this boy will reap the benefits of all the hard work he put into helping you make this farm profitable,' the angry fairy proclaimed, and with a flick of her wrist, the farmer and his wife and their children vanished, and the stable boy leaped back with a start from a family of black insects burrowing through the pile of cow manure at his feet with the flies that was his job to shovel."

"Ew, Tifa." Aeris grimaced, staring at the charred beef on the end of her fork. It was pretty dry although Tifa had done a good job of saving it when the squawking from the yard had sent her running outside only to see the tail end of a turkey disappearing back into the forest. "Did you have to choose that story to read?"

Zack laughed. "I don't see what's wrong with it," he said, forking the last burnt chunk of steak on his plate into his mouth with gusto.

"You wouldn't." Aeris set her fork down with a sigh and pushed her plate aside. "I'm not very hungry tonight."

The other girl lifted her brows. "I thought you said you wanted to hear a story."

"You couldn't have picked another one?"

"I've never read this one before. I didn't know how it was going to be. You have to admit, this one's more entertaining than most."

"It's gross."

Tifa gave a nonchalant shrug. "She is kind of evil, isn't she?"

"I wouldn't say evil exactly," Aeris said, nonplussed. "But she does seem to have an odd sort of fascination for beetles. Or maybe you just like those stories the best and always choose to read them."

"Or maybe she's just evil," Tifa reaffirmed. "She's more like the Queen of the Beetles."

"Tifa," Aeris reproached her gently. "That's not nice."

"Martha dubbed her that, not me. She'd be a wonderful queen if not for her tendency to turn everyone who gets on her wrong side into dung beetles. But don't worry." She gave Aeris a look that said she knew what her friend was thinking. "I'm not going to go around repeating it. You're the only ones I've said anything about it to."

"All right." Aeris was only too happy to move onto another topic. "But here's a question for you then."

Tifa's face was skeptical. "Are you going to lecture me?"

"No, that's your job," Aeris replied, biting back a laugh at the indignation that crossed the other girl's face. "This goes back to something that we've talked about before and I'm just curious what your answer would be considering the story you read tonight. Would you call the fairy queen turning the family into dung beetles an act of mischief or an act of anger?" She grinned. "Or was she merely meting out punishment?"

Tifa scowled.

"All three," Zack piped up. "I know, I know, but acts of anger and punishment could be viewed as various forms of mischief, can't they?"

"Not necessarily," Aeris argued. "Not when it's done purely out of a desire to teach the family a lesson for wrongdoing. Her reasons should be taken into account."

"It's mischief," Tifa said. "Mischief and because she's evil."

"Tifa!" Aeris shot her a look of exasperation. "Please don't say such things out in the open, I beg you."

"Calm down." Tifa rolled her eyes. "We're hardly out in the open. We're inside our own house."

"You should still know to be careful about what you say better than Zack or I do. You read fairy stories all the time. The mischievous fairies would not think twice about punishing a human for something they view as a slight to their queen."

"Who's lecturing now?" Tifa asked dryly. "Listen, I do know better than to say things where I can be overheard. Like I said before, I have no intention of going around repeating anything you've heard me say tonight."

Aeris had her doubts but she knew she could usually trust her friend's claims. "If you say so.'

"I do."

"She's beautiful."

The soft, dreamy voice was so out of place in the kitchen, the two girls forgot what they were arguing about and turned as one to stare at their companion. Zack was gazing at the wall across from his chair with a peculiar expression on his face that called to mind what was oftentimes described on the face of a moonstruck boy in stories.

"Zack?" Aeris asked softly.

Her voice seemed to break him out of the spell holding him as he shook his head and glancing around, saw that both his housemates were looking at him as if he'd taken leave of his senses.

"The fairy queen," he explained when he realized no one had acknowledged his previous statement. "She's beautiful."

Tifa didn't bother to hide her irritation. "She's a witch."

"She's beautiful," he said again. "Beautiful enough to cast her spell over any man and have him willing to do her every bidding with just a glimpse of her face."

She turned her scowl on him. "And just how would you know what she looks like, Zack?"

"All the stories say she is. 'The most beautiful woman who has ever walked the earth,'" he quoted a line that was, as he said, often seen printed in various stories. "They can't all be wrong."

"The stories say that about all fairies. According to them, every fairy surpasses even the most beautiful of humans," Tifa pointed out. "And I thought you don't believe in fairies anyway."

"Some days I don't, some days I do."

Aeris glanced at Zack in surprise. "Just because we don't hear of fairy sightings anymore doesn't mean they're not still around. You can't live in a place like this and not believe in them. I think that's why fairies stories are so prevalent out here."

"As long as the stories about the fairy queen's beauty aren't just tales, I'm fine with that."

"Honestly," Tifa snapped. "Is that really all you care about?"

"Of course. What else matters but that a woman is beautiful?"

"Oh, I don't know, what about having a good, kind heart?"

Black eyebrows drew together as though he was giving some thought to it. He shook his head, apparently oblivious to the daggers a pair of brown eyes were shooting at him. "I'll take a fair damsel over a good, kind one any day."

From her spot safely out of the way of any sharp objects that could possibly misfire, Aeris smothered a laugh as she watched her friends bicker this time around. Zack had a particular knack for getting under Tifa's skin and relished the opportunity to do so every chance he got.

"How like a man," Tifa retorted hotly, planting her hands on the table and leaning forward to glare at him. "Picking looks over kindness."

"Hey, she is a nice fairy."

"I'll eat my hat the day you pick a homely girl over a pretty one."

Zack sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. "Everything else being equal, why wouldn't I choose a pretty girl over a plain one?"

"I think what Tifa meant," Aeris explained with an impish grin, "is that we all know that a girl's character is not her most important attribute to you, Zack."

"And how is that a problem?" he asked with a careless shrug.

"It's stupid, that's how." Tifa's face was red with anger. "If that's all a man cares about, it's no wonder no girl will take him seriously. Right, Aeris?"

No sooner had the words tumbled from her lips then Tifa slapped her hand over her mouth. But it was too late. The room had become so silent, one could hear a pin drop and underneath his golden tan, Zack's face had turned pale.

Aeris stared at the other girl in shock. "Tifa!"

"I didn't mean it," Tifa whispered, dropping her hand. "Zack, I didn't mean it! I'm so sorry."

His face like stone, he gave an almost imperceptible nod and said stiffly, "It's all right. I know you didn't." He pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. "I should go check on the chickens."

Without another word, he strode out of the house.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

Aeris reached the summit of the hill and stood for a moment at the very top, surveying the countryside in all its summertime splendor around her. One of the things the people who lived there loved most about the land was that it remained relatively the same throughout the seasons. Winters would see a drop in temperature and the nights were frigid but by day, the grass was green and the sun shone brightly out on the hills, looking almost as warm as it did now. The green-brown hills with a lonely tree or shrub here and there and dark shapes scattered across the fields that were really great, big pieces of rock she saw now were not much different than what she would see in the coming weeks when the days would begin to get colder and the leaves started to fall.

A sudden fierce gust of wind whipped by, tossing her hair and dress about her. She swept her hair out of her eyes as she spun around slowly, admiring the verdant beauty of the landscape on almost every side. Below her to her left was a mass huddle of slowly moving white, guarded by the two large figures of brown and red sitting patiently just a short distance from their charges, and a few hills away to her right was the forest that lay far to the north, blocking the land beyond it from view.

Her eyes lingered on the forest, that dark, ancient wood that had always been such a source of great intrigue to the humans who'd chosen to build their homes so close to it but cautioned against. She was beginning to understand why she'd felt an inexplicable affinity for these woods all her life. Unlike everyone else, it was not the hills that had won her absolute devotion. For Aeris, she loved the hills that gave them their livelihood, but the forest had always held that special place in her heart. She'd known somehow that it held something that would be very important to her, something infinitely precious, and she would just have to wait until it finally chose to divulge what that was.

It had revealed a certain fairy, she thought now, a soft smile curving her lips as the image of a blond fey with eyes as blue as the midday sky covering the wide expanse of hills filled her mind.


	12. Chapter 12

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Twelve**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"Where were you?" The curt demand met Aeris as she opened the door, and the flower in her hand dropped to the floor as Lucy and Daisy raced past her inside the house.

She hung her hat on the wall and took her boots off, carefully shaking the dust from them and setting them by the door before she picked up the flower and answered Tifa. "I was out with the sheep as you well know."

"Don't give me that," the other girl huffed, ignoring the dogs chasing each other around her. "I went looking for you and found the sheep out on the range alone with Lucy and Daisy."

Aeris bristled. "Are you checking up on me?"

"You've been coming home late almost every day. I was worried about you."

"You needn't worry about me. I can take care of myself."

"But who's taking care of the sheep while you're gone? If you don't want to look after them, you know we can switch. If you want to do the chores at home, you just have to see to the animals in the barn and let out the chickens and gather the eggs and put up the washing before you…go wherever it is that you go. And make sure you come back in time to clean the house for a bit and prepare dinner."

"And what about the garden?"

"The safety of the sheep is much more important."

"They are safe," Aeris said defensively. "I'm only gone for a little bit each time and I wouldn't leave them by themselves if I didn't know they'd be all right. Their only danger is wandering off and getting lost but that's what the dogs are there for."

"Aeris."

She looked sullenly at her friend. "Yes?"

"What's gotten into you? You would never have done something like this before." She saw Tifa hesitate for a brief moment before she spoke again in a tentative voice. "Have you been meeting…someone?"

"What do you mean?"

"Are you meeting a boy?" she asked bluntly.

Aeris gasped. "You've been spying on me!"

"You are!" Tifa's eyes were round as saucers. "Aeris! _Who_?"

"Why are you asking me so many questions? It has nothing to do with you!"

"And Zack?"

"What about Zack?"

Tifa gave her a quelling glance. "He's noticed you disappearing too."

"So?"

"Does he have nothing to do with it as well? You know how he feels about you."

"What are you talking about? Zack and I—we're...friends. Family. That's all there is to it."

"He thinks of you as more than just 'friends' or 'family'. He—"

"Don't!" Aeris cut her off, suddenly afraid of what she was going to say. "Please don't say whatever it is you're thinking! We're friends! And he's just a boy."

Tifa wouldn't let her off the hook. "Zack is not just a boy, Aeris. He hasn't been a boy for a long time now."

"He is to me," Aeris said, proving a stubborn streak of her own that rivaled Tifa's. "He's the boy I grew up with. I can't see him as anything more than that—a very dear, sweet friend. Family, but not…not like…"

"He is a man and he looks at you with the eyes of one."

"No!"

"Yes! You see it too."

"I—" She looked helplessly at her housemate. "What about all the other girls? We always tease him about them. I thought…"

"He just likes the attention they give him. He's charming and flatters them outrageously—it's in his nature—but he's always made it clear that you're the one he has his heart set on. You must know that."

"It can't be." Aeris shook her head. "I never took anything he said to me seriously, and I can't now."

"How can you say that? You returned his affections…"

"Yes, I did," she admitted. "I would have been happy—I _was _happy, with him and with you, with the way things were. But Tifa, that was before I knew what it could really be like. I thought that was all there was to it."

"All there was to what?" Tifa's voice rose with anger. "To life?"

"Yes…" Aeris said cautiously. "To life… I didn't know. I couldn't have begun to guess that there can be so much more. And what was good enough before isn't good enough anymore." How could she explain to her friend that she felt like she'd been roused from a long sleep of dreaming about slow, idyllic days on the farm, and thrust into a world run amuck and exploding with life, a world bursting with colors and spilling with truth and magic and vivacity, and nothing in her dreams could compare? She'd been thinking all along that the time spent with Cloud was like a dream but it was, in fact, the exact opposite. He'd awakened her from that other dream-world and now that the dreamer was awake and had seen and experienced and felt all that could be, how could she ever go back?

"Aeris, think about what you're doing."

"I am."

"Aeris, Zack loves you."

"Please," she pleaded. "Don't say anything more. I love Zack, you know I do. He is as dear to me as a brother would be. But I can't love him like that. I already—" She stopped and looked at Tifa. The other girl wasn't ready to hear what she had to say.

But she saw the truth in Aeris' eyes anyway.

Tifa gasped. Brown eyes went wide with horror.

"You're already in love with _him_."

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"My gods," Aeris breathed. She was trying not to make any noise or sudden movement that would scare the young bear but it was hard not to be awestruck by the sight of the mother bear and her cub. And the cub didn't appear frightened at all. It seemed to have no fear of her despite its huge mother nudging it with her nose, and making low growling noises, trying to move it away from the human that had intruded upon them.

The cub ducked a powerful paw swiping at it and scampered right up to the fairy standing beside Aeris.

"Greetings, young friend," Cloud said, leaning forward with his hands on his knees and the bear put its front paws on his chest and stood upright. Sharp claws dug into the muscles on the fairy's chest, but he didn't seem to notice it as he ran his fingers through the bear's thick brown fur and stroked its face gently. "It's been a while, hasn't it? I'm glad to see you're doing well."

The bear moved to Aeris and looked up at her, waiting for her to give it the same adulation as it knew was its due. Without any trepidation whatsoever, she complied, reaching a hand down to the soft muzzle as Cloud had done. The cub turned its nose into her palm, sniffing and snorting, and she giggled as she felt its rough tongue scrape the palm of her hand.

"I see you haven't learned your lesson from your last encounter with a human."

"You mean this…?" Aeris turned stunned eyes to the fairy. "He's the one the hunter tried to shoot?" She glanced back at the bear, who was gazing up at her with such soft, curious eyes. "He must have been practically a newborn! A deer his size would have still been too young!"

"I thought humans like their game young, when their meat is tender and juicy?" he asked.

"Yes, but he was clearly born late in the season. There couldn't have been much meat on him yet."

"He's a she."

"Oh." She gave the bear a rueful smile. "She's beautiful."

"Thank you, friend."

Aeris looked up quizzically and saw that he was speaking to the bear hovering nearby, keeping a watchful eye on them.

"You brought a smile to her face today. We'll call us even, shall we?"

Aeris' eyes widened. She'd been so careful not to let anything spoil their time together, but he'd somehow sensed her disquiet about her confrontation with Tifa the previous day. She lowered her head, aware of a sudden strange lightness in the vicinity of her chest.

"Thank you," she murmured, to both the bears and the fairy.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

The sound of feminine giggles and a deep, baritone voice speaking reached Tifa's ears as she stepped out of the house for the umpteenth time.

How long has it been already? she thought with a sigh of frustration.

She closed the gate and went over to where a pair of mules were harnessed to a cart, as they had been for half the morning. "You fellows ready to hit the road?" she asked conversationally. The chestnut-colored male lifted his head and emitted a sound that was part whinny, part bray. At seeing Zack and the two girls coming from around the back of the house, he threw back his head with an angry snort and showed his chompers.

"So it's your turn, is it," Tifa said in exasperation to the old mule. "Must everyone get bewitched by Zack?" She ran a hand over his sleek coat. "Settle down, old boy. You have nothing to be jealous of. He's coming with us today."

The black mule grazed contentedly, not bothering to even look up to see what his companion was getting on about.

"If we ever get going, that is," she grumbled, mostly to herself. At this rate, the sun would be going back down in the west by the time those girls went home with the eggs they'd been sent out to fetch. There was no help for it; Tifa could not wait any longer.

"Zack," she called, trying to keep the irritation from her voice. "Are you coming?" If she'd been riding out on her own as she had planned, she would have been halfway to town by now. But as it was, he'd asked to accompany her this morning as she was getting the mules ready for their trip when their neighbors had shown up at the farm. "We have to get going."

Tifa watched now as he made his excuses to Martha and Beatrix, and they giggled and curtsied before thanking them both politely. Tifa smiled back and made the proper replies, but her smile disappeared as she stared after the backs of the two girls.

"Sorry about that," Zack said, striding quickly up to the cart. "That was my fault. I was just asking after Hans. I wanted to make sure he would be out with the men today."

His friend had caught a bug of some sort recently and had had to stay home for a few days. Knowing Zack, he was both worried about his friend, who had made it plain he was not happy about being forced to lie abed while everyone else had to work, and he wouldn't want to leave the men short-handed. But Tifa also knew that wasn't all the conversation had been about, but she bit her tongue and said in a mild tone, "That's all right." She didn't understand it herself why she'd been so short with everybody lately, but the last thing she needed was to lose her temper again and blurt out more things that were better left unspoken. "I just don't want to be too late to get any work done when we come home," she explained.

Zack was watching her out of the corner of his eyes. "What's this? You're not going to give me a hard time for keeping you waiting?"

A reluctant chuckle escaped her. "Since you wasted away most of the morning, you'll be brushing down the mules when we get home."

He sighed. "I just had to open my mouth, didn't I?"


	13. Chapter 13

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Thirteen**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

As the waterline reached the quarter mark on the vase, Aeris righted the pitcher and quickly set it down on her dressing table. One by one, she carefully placed the flowers back inside the vase and rearranged them to her satisfaction.

Out in the family room, she saw a breakfast of bacon and toast set in front of her chair at the table. But it was the long strip of pale pink taffeta sitting beside her basket and bag that brought her to a stop.

She immediately knew who it was from. He must have purchased it when he made the trip into town with Tifa last time. She picked it up, touched by the thoughtful gesture; he had noticed that her hair ribbon had become worn and frayed and made her a gift of a new one.

But Aeris also knew it wasn't just any gift.

"Zack," she whispered.

The trailing ends of the ribbon fluttered from fingers that trembled.

_Why?_ she agonized, staring down at the smooth, fine piece of cloth shimmering in the dim lighting of the only lamp lit in the room. Why had he waited until now to let her know how he really felt? Perhaps if he'd acted on his feelings sooner, there could have been a chance she would have developed the same feelings in return for him. If he hadn't waited so long. If none of this had happened. If she hadn't met Cloud...

Or was it as Tifa had said and she'd simply chose not to see? Was all his flattery and attention not simply in fun as she'd always assumed, but was, in fact, sincere on his part?

With shaking hands, she slipped the ribbon in front of the old bow in her hair and secured it before pulling the old threadbare piece of red satin free.

She cleared her plate, grabbed her hat and staff on the way out, and stepped out, hardly noticing the early morning chill. In the barn, she found Zack watering the mules and cows in the soft glow of the lantern while the dogs milled about in front of the sheep's pen, waiting for their shepherdess. At the sound of her footsteps, he glanced up and a pleased smile broke out on his face.

"Zack." Aeris turned her head around slightly, touched a hand to the shiny, pink ribbon in the brown curls. "Thank you. I've been meaning to ask Tifa to get me one but with everything else going on, it hasn't been at the top of my priorities. I didn't think anyone had noticed I needed a new one."

His smile widened. "It looks nice on you." A small frown creased his brow and sudden worry edged his voice. "Do you like it? I know it's not red, but..."

"It's one of my favorite colors," she reassured him. "And yes, I like the ribbon. Very much."

The frown smoothed itself out. "Good. I knew it was the right one as soon as I saw it. I've always liked the color on you."

Aeris blushed. "Thank you," she said again.

She took the empty pails at his feet and went out to the water pump. They worked together companionably, at ease with one another, filling the troughs for the animals. Once the task was completed, they parted ways, and Aeris went to fetch her sheep.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

A vicious yank on Aeris' hair sent pain shooting through her scalp as her eyes flew open.

She reached behind her instinctively, trying to tug her hair from the animal that had jumped on her in her sleep, vaguely aware of Cloud sitting up and shouting at somebody.

His hands joined hers, grabbing and wrenching the other ones away from her. Before she could blink, it had latched onto her hair again, pulling so hard, tears sprang to her eyes.

A feral-sounding growl came from above her, its hot breath on the back of her neck, and Aeris whimpered in fear. The fairy with her let out a ferocious snarl in response and the painful grip on her hair slackened, fell away.

She lifted dazed eyes to her attacker and saw a small body, unmistakably human in form, unclothed but for the leaves concealing certain areas of her anatomy, scurrying swiftly over the rocks in the stream. It cleaved through the rushes and safely on the bank on the other side, pivoted on her heels and pointing a finger at her, yelled out what sounded like a string of angry words in some strange language.

The young man beside Aeris responded sharply back but she couldn't understand a word he said either.

The small girl's chin jutted up defiantly as she planted her hands on her hips and shouted back at him. If that wasn't a tantrum the girl was displaying, Aeris didn't know what was. When he merely gazed back at her, his face expressionless once more, she stomped her foot, became even more worked up. Aeris watched, riveted by the sight of the girl gesturing and flailing her skinny arms wildly about, marveling that she didn't send the red flowers scattering from her straight black hair with her antics.

Cloud rose to his feet, his upper body leaning forward in a threatening manner and said something in a menacing tone. The girl beat a hasty retreat but as she disappeared into the foliage on the opposite bank, she yelled something back over her shoulder. His jaw clenched, but he remained unmoving beside her.

Aeris stared after the girl. "What was that about?"

"It was nothing."

"It looked like something to me. She didn't look very happy to see me."

"You're not a fairy."

He didn't have to say more than that.

Her head dropped. In silence and misery, she studied the grass growing in the peaceful meadow, ears closed to the soothing current of the stream moving leisurely southward. A moment later, she felt him squat down beside her.

"And I am glad for it."

The heaviness in her chest slowly dissipated. She chanced a glance up, met his eyes watching her. Whatever it was she saw in those fathomless blue depths, it reassured her. Her confidence restored, she ventured to broach the matter of the strange fairy. "She was... That is, she seemed rather angry."

Aeris thought she saw something akin to surprise flicker across his face, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. He gave a small nod. "Perhaps she's been watching the human world more often than she lets on."

"Who was she?"

"My cousin."

Her mouth fell open. "You have a cousin?"

"And an aunt and uncle, and even a mother and father, too." If he could get snippy, she was seeing it. She hid a smile. "I didn't grow out of a rock or a tree as humans would believe."

Aeris had to laugh. "No, we don't think either of those. We believe the hills give birth to fairies."

"I wouldn't be surprised if you really did believe that."

The laughter disappeared. She contemplated his face soberly. "We're not so very different, are we?" she asked, her tone pleading.

His eyes went back to the forest underbrush where his cousin had fled.

"We should go back."

"The sheep!" she gasped, remembering. She scrambled to her feet, nearly tripping over her own feet in her haste. "How could I have fallen asleep like that—!"

"Stop." Cloud's hands were on her arms, steadying her. "It was only a quick nap. Your sheep are perfectly fine." He reached out, touched a lock of hair tumbling over her shoulder. "You're taking part of the forest home with you."

Aeris thought he was referring to the bur he'd plucked from her hair, until she saw where he was looking. She flicked a glance down at her dress, and winced. "Tifa is not going to be happy with me." Her friend was used to her coming home with smudges on her clothes, usually of the dirt variety. She seldom complained unless they were green, as these were.

He passed his hand over the grass stains. "We can put them back where they belong." She watched in astonishment as the spots faded. He held his hand out. "Let's go, shall we?"

She smiled and gave him her hand.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

Aeris rounded the corner of the house and saw a haphazard pile of roughly hewn wood from a hickory tree that had been felled by some unseen force of nature in the forest months ago. Her eyes drifted to the wheelbarrow in the yard, mostly empty now but for a few neatly split logs. It had been brimming when she'd passed by earlier with the sheep and dogs on their way to the barn.

She watched, unobserved as the young farmer drove the axe through log after log, every fall of the axe swift, true, finding its mark, as woodchips flew through the air. He'd taken off his shirt and was wearing only his trousers; perspiration gleamed on his muscled chest and arms as he swung the heavy axe steadily with a strength that made it look easy.

Zack had always had his pick of the local farmgirls, and Aeris could see why. With his raven black hair and deep blue eyes, he was very easy on the eyes. His friendly smile and cheerful, laid-back personality that had remain unaffected by the rigors of life in the country made him even more attractive. Still, she wondered when he'd grown from an extremely good-looking boy into the beautiful young man wielding the axe like it was part of his arm before her today. Tifa was right. He was definitely not a boy. He had become a man, and a very handsome one at that. He was big and tall with broad shoulders and thick muscles carved from a life of hard work on the farm.

Aeris thought of another young man, with hair fairer than the sun and eyes bluer than the sky, whose striking beauty captivated and drew her as surely as the wilderness he came from. He had a slightly leaner frame than the built man chopping wood in the yard, and not as tall. But his arms, legs, and chest were also hard with muscles, and his hands at times felt rougher on her skin than they appeared, all of which told her that he was neither a stranger to toil nor did he lead an idle existence, and he moved with a powerful fluidity and grace that most men only wished they could boast.

"That's enough firewood to last us the whole winter, wouldn't you say?" she remarked, causing the axe to fly harmlessly past the thick block of hickory and sink into the tree stump with a loud thud. "How about taking a break?" Her eyes turned to the horizon, where a rare golden sunset blazed across the entire western sky. The days were becoming shorter, the evenings cooler. "Or just calling it a day? Dinner will be ready soon."

Leaving the axe partially buried in the base of the tree trunk that had been cut down several years ago and had served as a chopping block since, Zack looked up, brushed the damp hair back from his forehead. "Why not," he said, breathing hard. "I don't suppose we'll freeze tonight if I stop for the day." He took the canteen she held out to him with a smile of thanks and took a long swig.

"I'm positive we won't." Aeris picked up a pail sitting by the pump and worked her way around the chickens pecking at the ground, collecting branches and woodchips for kindling that lay strewn about the yard.

Zack chucked the few remaining logs that had fallen from the stump into the wheelbarrow and proceeded to drain her canteen, leaving just enough water to wet his hands and run them through his hair. He replaced the cork, and gave a nod toward the barn. "Are the girls with Tifa?"

She crossed the yard to the woodpile where she carefully poured the contents of the pail on top. "They snuck into the house behind you just now," she said, returning the pail to where she'd found it and exchanging it for her basket and staff.

"And they didn't even say hello to me?" His expression turned sour. "She must be sneaking them treats."

"They were all over you when we got back," Aeris reminded him. She raised a brow at him. "But she was feeding them scraps from last night's dinner."

"What?!" He looked outraged.

"Yep." Aeris nodded vigorously, struggling not to laugh at the expression on his face. "And bones too. _Big_ ones."

"I knew it!" Black eyebrows drew together in a fierce scowl. "I knew she was hiding the good ones. And she says I indulge them."

"You do," she said wryly. Truthfully, they all did. There was even a fairy who'd been brought to heel under the dogs' spell and fed them treats from his own tables.

He retrieved his shirt from the handle on the wheelbarrow. "How was your day?" he asked, working his arms into the sleeves.

Aeris did not miss the abrupt change in topic, but decided to let it pass. "The usual." Noting the sudden carefully blank expression on his face, she added on impulse, "Although one of the rams did try to horn his way between me and his dam. I think he thought I was encroaching on his territory."

The smile she'd wanted to see appeared. "That's all?" he chuckled, his eyes twinkling. "The other rams didn't try to lead the rest of the ewes astray while you were busy with the first one and wasn't looking?"

"Only you would do that, Zack." She laughed. "Not all males think as you do."

He didn't laugh with her. "I only do that with one female," he said quietly.

This was where Aeris would have normally asked which farmer's daughter was the new one he had his eyes on, but the way he was looking at her suddenly made her question whether she wanted to hear the answer. She thought that there was something to what Tifa had said. It seemed that Zack did look at her differently than the way he looked at the other girls. His manners were also more gentle, his voice softer when he spoke to her, and there was something else too, a rather hopeful, wistful undertone to it that she'd never noticed before. It had always been that way, she realized.

Uneasy at the direction her thoughts had taken, she averted her eyes, cutting their banter short. A slow movement out of the corner of her eyes drew her attention to the roof where wispy tendrils of gray smoke rose in lazy spirals from the chimney into the sky. Aeris could smell the fat dripping from the meat cooking on the spit inside the house, imagined she could hear it sizzle as it hit the fire below, see the flames burst.

"I can do with a little something to eat," she said, returning her eyes to his face. "Care to join me?"

He looked disappointed she hadn't countered with a playful rejoinder. "You know Tifa's going to say you're spoiling your appetite right before dinner."

"Why do you think I'm asking you?" she asked lightly. "You're going to distract her while I sneak something out of the kitchen. She told me this morning she planned on baking strawberry scones today."

Zack nodded, but his smile was not as bright as usual. "Fine. But you have to help me get the chickens into the coop first."

Aeris grinned. "Deal."


	14. Chapter 14

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Fourteen**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"We're running out of water," she said to Cloud one day, sitting on a boulder in the stream beside him.

"There is water if you look up."

Aeris lifted her eyes from the fern she was twirling back and forth between her fingers to search his face, looking for a clue as to what he was thinking or feeling, but his face was inscrutable. "I meant drinking water for our wells."

The fairy's eyes were fixed on something behind her in the forest. She heard a faint rustling in the brush but when she looked back over her shoulder, there was nothing but the woods and the first leaves of fall drifting gently down from the trees, spinning and dancing in the breeze like flickering tongues of red and gold flames.

She swung back around to face him. "The wells are drying up and it's getting harder to dig deep enough to reach the water level anymore," she went on. "You mentioned before that your kind can communicate with nature, control it to an extent. Perhaps…" Impassive blue eyes met hers, and she almost lost her courage. "Perhaps you can help us."

Blond lashes lowered, veiling his eyes as he ran a hand through his hair. "Our "kind" do not interfere with humans, or aid in the destruction of other life," he said at length.

"I know," she said desperately. "But we don't mean to destroy anything."

His eyes came back to hers. "Tell that to the fish and the beaver and all the other animals that live in the river, and the plants and the trees that depend on it for survival."

"What about the flowers? The water lilies? They're here, aren't they? If humans... If we are so terrible, they wouldn't still be around, would they?"

"These hills are the only place in the world where they still grow."

A part of her wanted to be angry. Clearly fairies made exceptions to their own rules and interfered when it suited their purposes to do so, she thought, a bit unfairly perhaps. "When the water's gone, we won't be able to live out here either. If we're forced to leave, that means I'll have to go, too…"

A strange look entered his eyes. Aeris took hope from it.

He turned his face to the stream, gazed down at the colorful leaves floating past them on the current. For Aeris, not even the sight of the woods in its most glorious season could dispel the sense of foreboding that was slowly growing inside of her. Only one person could put her fears to rest.

"We do not interfere with humans," he repeated the mantra.

Aeris' heart sank.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

'"The fisherman's wife saw a tender look come into the fairy's eyes, turning them a dark liquid amber, as she touched her hand to the flower in her hair. "I must be getting back," the fairy queen said, feeling the gold petals gingerly as though to make sure each and every one was undamaged and safely intact. "I've been away far longer than I expected to be and I am needed at home. You shall—"'

"Good afternoon."

A shadow fell over her book and Aeris glanced up, startled.

"Zack!" A smile of pleasure lit up her face as she closed the book and slipped it inside her bag. "Are you going home?"

He dropped his lunch-pail and the spade from his shoulder and stretched his arms and legs. "Uh-huh."

A grin tugged at her mouth as she took in the handsome face streaked with dirt. "Had a long day?"

"A long day and nothing to show for it," he answered, sinking wearily down onto the ground beside her and looking out at the farm a short distance away. "I'm surprised you stayed pretty close to the farms today. You're usually too far out to see. Why hasn't Old Ben come running out to chase you off with a stick or Carrie's doll?"

Aeris blinked at him. "I beg your pardon?"

"That's what he was threatening some of the boys with the last time we were here. She was the closest thing to him."

Aeris grinned at the thought of the elderly farmer who liked to scare off the children who were always trying to make off with the pies his daughter, Dottie, left on the porch to cool. It was the opinion of everyone in the hills that nobody could bake a pie like Dottie, and apparently, the townspeople agreed as well, as evidenced by the weekly trips the young widow made into town with her cartful of baked goods, and not even a grumpy, stick-waving old man could deter the children from trying to get their hands on one of her mouth-watering pies.

"Well, I just thought the grass was in bad need of a trim out here." She didn't add that she'd spotted Jason, who was a good friend of Zack's, out with the pretty widow's cattle a couple of times and had arrived this morning to see him driving a herd whose number she knew included those that did not belong to him. After Dottie had finished her baking for the afternoon, she'd brought her little girl out with her along with one of her famous peach cobbler pies to share with Aeris before taking Carrie back to her grandfather at the house and left, presumably to bring home her cows. Aeris, for her part, had felt the weight of guilt ease slightly at having neighbors to share some of the burden, but admittedly, Dottie and Jason hadn't looked like they were exactly trying to keep their courtship a secret. "I guess Dottie must be grazing her cattle elsewhere lately."

"So it would appear."

Lucy and Daisy had seen Zack and for once, so forgot themselves that they left their positions and raced over eagerly in an excited flurry of hot dog breaths and pants, and pounced on Zack.

"Whoa!" he laughed as they toppled him in their enthusiasm and tried to outdo each other licking his face. "Whoa! Share, girls! There's enough of me to go around!" He sat up only to be brought down again by another jump from Daisy. "Daisy! Lucy! Let me up!"

Aeris giggled, watching him struggle to get the girls off. "I was beginning to think they'd forgotten the rest of us. I was almost afraid they were going to snarl at you, or worse, start pushing and herding the sheep together again in such a close huddle, they wouldn't be able to move around to eat. Poor Dottie, she probably felt like one of the children her father is constantly chasing off."

A frown crossed Zack's face as he petted and scratched behind the dogs' ears. "What do you mean, pushing and huddling the sheep together? Like they're rounding them up? Have they changed their behavior?"

"I-I..." Aeris stammered as the happy dogs trotted off happily to safeguard their sheep. "Well, it has been a few years since you used to come out with us. They've learned to settle down a bit, I suppose. Mind you, they are still very overprotective of the sheep. It's just different from how they were before."

Zack's eyes narrowed, but he simply nodded. "Shouldn't you be heading back too? It'll get dark soon real quick."

"I should," Aeris sighed. She'd wanted to enjoy the sun for as long as she could but she knew he was right. She grabbed her bag and shepherd's crook as Zack stood up and let out a sharp whistle that the dogs immediately responded to. She smiled, watching them gather the sheep who seemed unwilling to go home just yet. "It looks like you've still got it."

He smiled back as he gave her his hand and pulled her to her feet. "I'm glad to see some things haven't changed."

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"Who is he, Aeris? Why are you hiding him from us?"

Tifa saw Aeris' back stiffen as she shook the water from a turnip and set it inside her basket.

She'd made it a point to seek out and talk to all the boys on the neighboring farms under the pretense of friendly visits and errands, but had come up empty-handed. From their answers, it seemed unlikely any of them were the one meeting up with Aeris on a regular basis.

She moved around the well pump until she could see the other girl's profile. "You're wearing Zack's ribbon but you're still meeting him."

Aeris' face flushed and her mouth tightened, but she merely bent her head lower over the bucket, scrubbing her day's findings more vigorously so that the water sloshed over the top but she paid no mind to it.

Tifa felt justified in her frustration with her. "You would destroy our home, our family, to be with this boy! Aeris, you don't know what this will do to him if he finds out. You have to stop seeing him, whoever he is." She said nothing in reply and that only infuriated Tifa further. "Think about what you're doing, Aeris! You'll break his heart!"

"And what about me?" Aeris suddenly cried as she turned to face her, heedless of the radishes in her hands, and Tifa saw angry tears glistening in her eyes. "What about my heart? Doesn't it matter, too? Doesn't it matter that you'll break my heart if you make me stop seeing him? You don't know what you're asking of me!"

Tifa stared at her, utterly shaken by her good-natured friend's outburst.

"You and I…" she began in a small voice, frightened but determined to have it out. "We both lost our families when we were children. Zack and his parents opened their home to us, welcomed us both, made us part of their family when no other farm would. We would have been left to starve on our own. But I was far from grateful." Her voice was tinged with sudden shame at the memories. "Don't you remember how it was, Aeris? When I blamed everyone else for my mother and father's deaths and tried to shut out everything around me, you wouldn't let yourself do the same. Your parents had died, too, just as mine had. Your world must have fallen apart too. You had to be hurting as much as I was. But you were out there with Zack and his parents, working on the farm, taking the sheep out, even putting aside your grief and laughing with them, and I came to see how selfish I was being. I knew then why Zack admired you so. Why everyone did. And I wanted to be like you. What happened to the girl who always thought about everyone else before herself? What happened to you?"

"She realized that there is more to life than just trying to survive," Aeris said with a slight tremor in her voice before she was able to get it more firmly under her control than Tifa had. "She discovered that she didn't just want to watch life pass her by; she wanted to live it. And there's someone else now, too… I can't hurt him."

"But...you would hurt Zack." She stared at the brunette girl Zack adored as if she'd never seen her before. "You would destroy his happiness. That's what will happen if you insist on seeing this boy. How can you do that to him, Aeris? How can you be so selfish?"

A tear rolled down her friend's cheek. "Don't you see, Tifa? I can't love Zack like that. I already—"

Tifa took a step back, her hands flying up to ward off what she knew was coming next. "Aeris…"

"I love him."

"Aeris, no."

"I do," Aeris said, brushing her sleeves across her eyes. She dropped the radishes into the basket and hauled the remaining plants out of the bucket and shook them out with stiff, jerky movements, before dumping out the water, and went inside the house with her basket and staff.

Zack, Tifa thought in despair. What was she going to do?


	15. Chapter 15

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Fifteen**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"There's something I've been meaning to ask you," Aeris began. "A minor detail perhaps, but it's been on my mind quite a bit."

Cloud gave a small nod, waiting for her to speak.

"It's really quite silly," she said, feeling a little embarrassed. "At least you'd probably think so, but..."

"I'm sure it's not," he said confidently. "Why don't you tell me what it is and we'll see what I make of it?"

"The fairy queen…"

"Yes? What about her?" he asked quickly, and eagerly, she thought.

"There are some stories that say she wears a white flower in her hair and it's how everyone knows who she is even when she's in disguise, because the flower is like no flower that grows on earth. But there are other stories that say she always wears a golden flower, which is also how people recognize her because it glows with a light that humans who have seen it swear comes from the sun itself." She gave him a look of confusion. "Which one is correct or are we wrong on both accounts?"

She watched him mull over his reply. "They're both right…and wrong."

"But how can that be?" Aeris asked, perplexed. "Does she wear both flowers then? Or is it something else? Does she switch back and forth between them?"

"She used to wear white in her hair. But it wasn't just a single flower or even a flower at all. It was made from snowflakes that had fallen from the sky. She now wears a golden flower in her hair. I believe the people in this land are familiar with the story of the flower's creation."

Aeris' lips parted with wonder.

He inclined his head slightly. "Yes, that part of the tale is true. In some parts of the world, humans relate the story of how she got the flower through poems. Other cultures have set it to music. They've been known to sing it, rather than just tell it."

"Sing it?" she echoed.

He nodded again. "There is magic in all speech and human language can be quite powerful when spoken and used properly by those who know how to bend them to their will. The ballad about how the queen got the white flower is one of my favorite stories and I've only ever heard it told in a small country across the ocean. The first time I heard it sung by a real storyteller, I could almost see myself standing in a field of white with snow drifting down all around me. I could feel each snowflake land upon me, hear the wind howling and blowing flurries of snow against me."

"'A snowstorm in winter,'" Aeris breathed. "That's what the stories say. But if that was a snowflake in her hair, then whenever she made them rain down, it would have been ice... Snow, not flowers."

He nodded. "The ones she makes aren't as cold and melt rather quickly. You should see when gold is falling out of the sky and you're dancing and eating amongst gold flowers that shimmer like sunlight. Mortals have a hard time seeing in the brightness even though she dulls the light somewhat so she saves them mainly for fairy celebrations." The corner of his mouth turned up faintly and the blue eyes darkened with warmth. "She likes to say that the color of her flower is just like my hair."

Aeris marveled at the revelation. "Does she keep company with common fairies often?"

"Common?"

"Common, like you," she explained. "Fairies who aren't royalty or of noble blood. Peasants, we would call them in the old days."

A blond brow lifted. "Fairies don't really make a distinction when it comes to who we keep company with. It is very hard to tell the nobility from the masses on any given day unless you knew them personally," he said. "She has never withheld herself from me or been too busy to give her time and attention to any fairy that wants to visit with her. I see her and talk to her every day."

The picture of the warm, kind queen he painted was nothing like the vengeful one that humans were more acquainted with. "She sounds wonderful."

"She is," he said with a touch of pride. "You would think so, too."

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

Two days later, Aeris awakened to another lily on her window, basking in the barely visible light of the morning sun that was just beginning to rise in the east, smaller and more pale than it had been in the early days of summer. Smiling, she slipped it into the vase that contained an abundance of the wildflowers.

She got dressed and finished her morning routine, made her bed, then ate a breakfast of sausages and potatoes Tifa had set out for her, and hurried out to the barn. To her pleasant surprise, Zack and Tifa had watered the animals and milked the cow and were nowhere in sight. She made a mental note to thank them later and rushed out of the barn with the sheep and dogs.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

Dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky when she found a nice field far enough away from the closest farmhouse. She herded the sheep to the new field and ran most of the way to their meeting spot.

She smiled as she saw him step out of the forest and hastened forward, but her smile faded when he suddenly moved back into the shadows, and she couldn't make him out anymore.

"Cloud?"

Aeris felt the hair rise at the back of her neck. She turned around, eyes widening at the sight of the figure that was storming down the hill after her.

Zack's face was black with fury but he did not utter so much as a word until he reached her. "So that's him."

"Zack?" she asked, feeling as disoriented as though she'd just stepped out of some strange dream and couldn't quite figure out where she was or how she got there.

"My gods, Aeris! He… He's not even a human!"

"H-how did you—? Did you follow me here? Were you following me the whole way?"

"I knew you were up to something," Zack said accusingly. "You were in such a hurry to leave again. But this! I never thought, never imagined—he's a fairy! A fairy! Are you out of your mind?"

"Don't do this," she said, trying to remain calm despite the trembling all over her body. She'd never seen him in such a rage before. "Don't say something you'll regret."

"Something I'll—" he sputtered. "I'm not the one who'll regret _this_. You've gotten mixed up with a fairy!"

"Zack—"

"How could you, Aeris? How could you do this?"

"Because I wanted to!" she said loudly, suddenly as angry as he. "Because I love him!" He recoiled at that and she took a deep, steadying breath, and forced herself to lower her voice. "I'm sorry, Zack, but I do," she continued gently to soften some of the blow. "I—"

"You don't know what you're saying," he said abruptly. "You've been bewitched by him! You're not thinking with your head."

"No, Zack, you're the one who doesn't know what you're talking about. You don't know him. Until this moment, you didn't even really believe in fairies, did you?"

"I know his kind!" Zack's voice rose in volume. "They're pranksters, tricksters of the worst kind, creatures of the wild! Their lot has never done anything good for man but create one mischief after another. They make our livestock sick and spoil our crops, snatch our children from their beds, and turn us into dung beetles! They spell nothing but trouble for us!"

"You see, you're repeating stories you've heard," Aeris said quickly, seeing her chance to get a word in edgewise as he paused for breath. "That's not how they are at all. They're people, too. Just like us."

"They are _not_ like us. Whatever else they are, that's the one thing they're not. They do not have emotions. You may not want to believe the tales but you saw him and so did I. Those eyes are not natural, and those ears! And," he stated with an almost furious kind of glee, "he wasn't wearing clothes! The stories got that right. They're heathens. They run around naked. They have no sense of propriety or decency—"

"Clothes have nothing to do with propriety for their kind. They are nature spirits. For them, it is unnatural to cover up their bodies—"

"The point," Zack snarled, "is not everything we've heard about them is false. What makes you think the part about them not having emotions isn't also true? They don't feel like we do. That's why they cause us so much grief. They don't know what it's like. They come out, tease us, and stir up all kinds of trouble then leave us to stumble blindly about, trying to fix the problems they create while they laugh at us. For all we know, they're the reason why the wells have dried up! This drought was probably their doing!"

"I know that's not true!"

"You think you know him. You saw how he ran off the moment he saw me and left you to face me on your own. What kind of a man would do that?" he asked, shooting a scornful look at the trees nearby. "I saw him. And I know what I saw. He is _not_ human." He glanced back at the forest, eyes searching the underbrush, but she knew he couldn't see the fairy. "Why don't you just come out? I know you're there."

"Don't," she said, quiet anger in her voice. "Leave him alone. He doesn't have to answer to you or anyone."

Zack ignored her. "Be a man and own up to your actions." His nostrils flared. "Don't skulk in the shadows. Or are you ashamed you were caught with a human girl? Is she not good enough for you? Will the other fairies disapprove of her and ridicule you?"

Something moved in the darkness of the forest and her heart skipped a beat as a familiar voice spoke, low and soft, soothing her raw nerves, before he stepped into view. "I thought I would give the two of you a chance to talk and sort things out."

"Give us a chance to talk and sort things out," Zack parroted furiously. "More like cowering and hiding in the safety of the shadows while she takes the heat. You're just like the rest of your kind. You stir up trouble then run away and leave us to deal with your mess. Is sneaking around the only thing fairies are good for?"

Aeris inhaled sharply. She could see a muscle tick faintly in the fairy's jaw, the blue eyes growing paler, like shards of ice and despite her own growing antagonism, she knew a sudden fear for Zack who was too incensed to notice anything amiss.

But when Cloud spoke, his voice held no trace of anger. "Think what you will. You've already made up your mind about us and nothing I say or do will change it. But it is her choice to make whether or not she believes as you do."

Zack's eyes burned with rage. "Fine, then. Make a choice, Aeris. Him or us. Fairy or human. Will you turn your back on your own people?"

Aeris turned shocked eyes to him. "I won't," she cried vehemently. "I won't choose! You can't make me. You have no right."

"I should go." The bright, piercing eyes that humans found so unnerving were on her. "I'm only making things worse."

Aeris opened her mouth but Zack beat her to it. "Go," he ordered. "Go! Let her see what a coward you are and have no more doubts about you."

"Zack," she begged, trying to fight back tears. "Stop this, please!"

"I will go." The fairy's eyes were positively glacial. "But I will go because of her, not you."

"As long as you go," Zack snapped. "That's good enough for me."

Cloud's jaw clenched but he simply turned to look at her. She stared back at him and it seemed to her that he wanted to say something to her, but he only lifted a hand toward her face. She barely felt his fingers graze her cheek, and then he was gone.

For a long moment, Aeris was too stunned to speak.

At last she turned to her housemate. "Are you happy now?" she whispered.

From the look on Zack's face, he was neither happy nor furious anymore. "Aeris," he said hoarsely.

"No." She closed her eyes, and drew in a deep, painful breath. "Not right now."

Tears blurred her vision as she stumbled blindly away and made her way back to the pasture where she'd left her flock.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

Tifa heard the sound of heavy footsteps dragging up toward the house from outside the open door and wondered which one of her housemates had come back for their lunch.

A teasing smile sprang readily to her lips as she flipped her hair back and whirled around, but the ribbing she'd been about to give whoever it was died in her throat. Zack's face was ashen.

She would've thought he'd consumed poison but she'd packed his lunch this morning with extreme care and he was as healthy as a bull.

"What is it, Zack?" she asked fearfully as he crossed the room and dropped down into his chair. "What on earth has happened?"

He swallowed and said shortly, "Nothing, Tifa."

Tifa had a horrible feeling she knew the cause of his misery. "It's Aeris, isn't it?" she pressed. "It's about her."

She set the broom against the wall and joined him at the table.

"Don't ask if you don't want to know."

"You found out," she said dully. "You found out she's been seeing a boy."

"You knew?" Zack looked so anguished, Tifa couldn't continue holding his gaze and had to look down at the table. "By gods, Tifa, you knew, and you didn't tell me?"

"I... I didn't know for certain," she tried to explain. To her surprise, she found herself fidgeting with her fingers now that her hands had nothing to do. "But I saw the signs. I guessed. But she wouldn't tell me anything when I asked, only enough for me to conclude that she's been meeting someone."

"Do you know who it is?"

She shook her head. "I met and talked to all the boys on the farms, and I still have no clue which one it is."

He laughed. "It's none of them."

Tifa looked at him, utterly confused. "How can it be none of them? It can't be anyone else but a boy from around here. The closest town is half a day's walk from here." Tifa could hear herself babbling, but couldn't seem to put a stop to it. "She wouldn't be able to find the time to see him and also take care of the sheep then get back home in time and—"

"Oh, he's from around here all right," Zack chuckled humorlessly. "In fact, he lives right in the forest. She's been meeting him in secret for gods know how long..." He made some sort of unidentifiable sound in his throat.

"No one lives in the forest—"

"A fairy, Tifa."

She thought her ears were deceiving her. She laughed. "Forgive me, Zack, I know this isn't funny. But I thought I heard you say fairy."

"I did." He looked so hurt and betrayed that Tifa knew as ridiculous as it sounded, he had to believe what he was saying.

"Zack," she said gently. "That can't be."

"But it is, Tifa. I know how it sounds, but it's true. It's real. The stories are real." Zack shivered. "_They're_ real."

What could she say? What on earth was she supposed to say to that?


	16. Chapter 16

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Sixteen**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"Aeris, is it true?"

Her voice brought the other girl to a halt outside the house where Tifa had been standing in the doorway, watching her approach.

"Zack told you." Aeris' tone was frosty.

"He's really a…a fairy?"

Aeris turned her face toward the garden so Tifa couldn't see her eyes. "Fairies are not the way that we've made them out to be."

"They're not human."

"Cloud's a person."

"A person with powers that are not normal," Tifa enunciated each word slowly and carefully so her friend would hear every word. "Aeris, why didn't you say anything about...this Cloud? He's the one, isn't he? The stranger you found that night, hurt in the woods. Why didn't you tell me?"

"It wasn't important."

"Not important?" Tifa repeated. "Aeris, he's a fairy! It is unnatural and...and wrong for a human and a fairy to..."

"Don't say anymore, Tifa." There was a note of warning in the other girl's voice but Tifa was too upset to pay it any mind.

"You're under an enchantment. He's worked his magic on you! You just don't realize it. Haven't we heard of all these stories about children being stolen from their beds, never to be returned?"

Aeris' hand curled tighter around her staff. "They're stories."

"They had to come from somewhere. Aeris, they're mischief-makers. How do you know he's not just playing with you and with your feelings? Think about it. Everything he's done and said to you, they could all be lies! He could be laughing at you behind your back the whole time with the other fairies!"

"He would never do that!" she exclaimed, turning to face her and Tifa felt a stab of guilt at seeing how dangerously close to tears her friend was. She had a sinking feeling that she'd probably been on the brink of tears all day and was only hanging onto her control by a slender thread. "Oh, Tifa, I wish you wouldn't talk about him like that. You don't know what he's like at all. You've never even met him!" Feeling a bit contrite, Tifa stepped aside to let her enter and Aeris immediately swept past her inside the house. "First Zack, now you!"

"I know he's a fairy. What more do I need to know?" Tifa said, following her to her bedroom. "What if he kidnaps you?"

"It's only ever been children that have been taken in the stories. You don't hear about it happening to a grown man or woman."

"You can be the first one it'll happen to." She stopped outside Aeris' bedroom door, watched her as she poured water from a pitcher into the basin at her dressing table and dip a washcloth into the water to wet it. "Don't go with him anymore, Aeris. If you do, you'll be lost to us forever. We don't want that to happen."

But Aeris was scrubbing the day's dust and grime from her neck and face with a look of concentration on her face that told Tifa she was done with talking.

With a sigh, Tifa closed the door and went to set the table for dinner.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

He wasn't there when Aeris arrived at the fork by the well the next morning, but a short while later, she heard the leaves flutter gently in the branches near her and would have thought it was the wind in the trees if she had never met a certain fairy, but she knew otherwise.

She was proven correct when a moment later, a figure stepped out of the trees.

The lure of the woods and the young man that dwelled within them proved greater than her fear of the unknown. Disregarding her friends' worry and the advice of her neighbors, she gave him her hand and followed him into the mysterious woods that she alone, of all humans, felt at home in.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~ <strong>

"Here you are. Got it, Patrick?" Tifa handed the basket she'd packed with eggs and zucchini back to the Franklin boys. "Lucy and Daisy will be so sad to hear they missed you," she said, reaching down to ruffle a pair of soft, furry ears almost similar to the aforementioned dogs' but for their blazing red color.

The canine everyone fondly referred to as Red for his scarlet pelt let out a friendly woof.

"They saw him last week," the youngest Franklin boy said with a wide, disarming grin that showed a gap in the bottom front row of his teeth. "We went to Benny's..."

"Davy!" Patrick clapped his hand over his brother's mouth.

Davy shoved the older boy off with a disgruntled look. "I was just 'bout to say we were gonna go visit 'em!"

The huge dog at his side gave the boys a long-suffering look that had Tifa stifling a laugh. Red was possessed of such a calm and noble demeanor, and intelligent eyes that many a farmer at one time or another had remarked that they would not have been the least bit surprised to hear him speak. She smiled sympathetically at the dog and leaned down toward the five-year-old boy to ask in a conspiratorial whisper, "Did it taste very good?"

He beamed. "It was the best! Aeris gave me her pie, it was almost whole! Peach!"

"Aeris?"

"Yeah, she was there. And she gave us _both_ her pie to share." Patrick gave his brother a pointed look. "Said she couldn't eat the whole thing."

Tifa chuckled at the bewildered expressions on the boys' freckled faces.

Davy stuck out his lower lip in a pout. "She said it was probably best to share her pie so Dottie wouldn't have to cut 'nother one and have more pies to sell."

"Is that why she didn't bring any home for us?" Tifa asked in a plaintive tone of voice.

A look of guilt crossed the young boy's face.

Patrick wrinkled his nose. "He made himself sick eatin' so much."

"You ate just as much as me!" Davy accused. "You ate half!"

"It was my share," the older boy said defensively.

"We didn't save any for Matty either," Davy confessed. "Don't tell him, 'kay, Tifa?"

"All right," Tifa said, as gravely as she could managed. "I won't."

The boys left with Red, who immediately took up his place next to the younger boy. Tifa walked them to the gate and watched them leave, smiling as she noticed how the faithful hound made sure to keep himself by the boy's side. The Franklin family dog had been born to the same litter as Lucy and Daisy, and was the only puppy who had inherited their mother's fiery red coat while the rest of his siblings took after their father and had brown fur with burning patterns of red here and there. But like his siblings, Red's features were more feline than many other canine breeds, almost resembling a lion in some aspects, which had often made Tifa wonder if the two species didn't share a common ancestor not very far in the past—the idea was preposterous, of course, but certainly no more so than the idea of a human and a fairy.

Tifa's face darkened at the reminder of the situation at home.

The boys and the dog had been a welcomed intrusion into the troublesome thoughts that had been hanging like a cloud over her all day. Seeing the simple joys, and woes, of the young had been an immense help in taking her mind off of her housemate and her choice for a companion.

A human and a fairy, Tifa thought, shaking her head incredulously. For Tifa, it wasn't so much that she doubted fairies were real. As Aeris had pointed out, all she had to do was take a look around her and she could not deny the existence of things that were out of the ordinary and beyond her own everyday experiences. The forest was so thick with magic, one could feel it emanating from the finest blade of grass growing within its hidden meadows to the branches and roots of its mightiest tree even when just looking at the woods from a distance. It was in the hills, in the ground under their feet, the very air they breathed—it was inescapable. Wherever one went, that great and ancient power was ever present and felt by anyone who ever came within the vicinity of the forest or hills. But it was unthinkable that anyone would attempt to cross the lines of separation that nature had intentionally set for its inhabitants and be with someone who was not of their own kind, or would even want to. Whatever tales humans had written concerning illicit affairs between their races, it just wasn't done.

But Tifa could tell her friend wanted exactly what nature had forbidden.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~ <strong>

"She's meeting with him again."

From where she stood with her shoulder propped against the doorframe, Tifa stiffened. Regardless of her own personal feelings on the matter of their housemate and the fairy, maybe she should not have set up post and kept watch as Aeris left.

"Did she say so?" she asked without turning around.

"She didn't have to." Anger and defeat, two things she'd never associated with Zack before, were evident in his voice now. "You can tell when she's about to go see him. She's met with him the last three days, too."

Tifa felt sick. "Aren't you going to go after her?"

She heard him let out a heavy sigh at her back before he trudged off to get his things and go out into the fields with the men.

Tifa finally turned her head to look back over her shoulder, gazed down the dark hallway as his door swung shut.

"I'm sorry, Zack," she whispered.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~ <strong>

She waited, turning the words from the last few days' conversations with Zack and Tifa over and over in her head, and at some point looked up and saw a pair of bright blue eyes fringed by heavy golden lashes watching her intently from under the shadows of the forest trees.

Aeris felt a hot flush stain her cheeks. "I'm sorry. I was woolgathering," she began to apologize but he held up a hand, putting a stop to the flood of words tumbling forth from her lips. She'd had things on her mind the whole week and had not been giving him her full attention whenever they were together.

"I would think you have more than enough of those."

Her eyes widened but she couldn't tell if he was just teasing her or if he was serious.

"Come." The fairy held his hand out to her, a gesture that was now familiar to her. "There's something I want to show you."

To her surprise, he didn't take her far into the forest but to a glade just within the borders.

She watched in bemusement as he went to the ground on his knees, picked up a strong, sturdy branch from the ground, and began digging into the soft earth with it.

Aeris knelt down beside him. "Why don't you try this?" she suggested, taking a small, slender object made of wood and steel out of her bag.

"A human tool?" he inquired, looking at the gardening tool in her hand.

She nodded. "It's a trowel. I use it for carrots and onions and things like that."

He took it from her.

She didn't have to show him how to use it, he already knew. Probably from previous observations of humans at work in their gardens, Aeris presumed. Not to mention he'd seen her use it on a few occasions herself. He worked quickly and deftly, the muscles in his arms flexing with each stroke and in no time at all, carved a hole big enough to fit both his hands in comfortably.

Only a few inches in, he set the trowel aside and brushed the loose dirt from the hole with his hands.

"Do you see these?"

She leaned over to take a closer look at the roots he'd uncovered. They looked like any other plant roots save for the fact that they were long, smooth, and appeared perfectly hairless, and the tips were green.

"See how close they are to the surface?" He flicked the minuscule round end of one of the roots that had to be a bulb.

"Yes," she answered. She would see them once in a while when she was out with the sheep and she had to dig deep to get at a particularly stubborn turnip or potato that had decided to grow way down in the ground. They were the bane of farmers when it came time to plow the field with the way that they seemed to grow all over the place in great tangled nests and were an incredible nuisance to clear. Her eyes widened in astonishment. "Are these…?"

Cloud nodded. "We're very close to water in this part of the woods. The land here used to be the boundaries of the hills."

He took her hands and helped her to her feet.

"Close your eyes."

Aeris immediately complied, and waited.

"All right. Now... Open them."

She did as he instructed and her breath caught in her throat.

A being of golden light with huge gossamer wings stood before her. Soft light radiated from his body and the wings at his back shimmered in the sunlight as if there were tiny flecks of crystals embedded all over them and his hair shone so bright, it should have hurt her eyes to look directly at him. She peered into his glowing face and it was the same face she loved but a thousand times more beautiful.

It seemed almost blasphemous to break the silence in the clearing, but she dared a whisper. "Cloud?"

He spoke, and it was his voice. "Look around you, Aeris."

With a great deal of effort, she forced her eyes away from the mesmerizing sight he presented.

And gasped.

They were standing in the middle of a white flower-field. Hundreds, thousands, of water lilies had sprung up where there had been only green grass moments ago. She spun around slowly, almost afraid that if she moved too fast, the flowers would vanish like a dream. And so would he. She turned back to him, and seeing him still standing there in all his glory, felt her heart fill to overflowing with pure joy.

She smiled at him. "I feel like I've just stepped into the realm of faerie."

"Didn't you know, Aeris?" He tucked a flower behind her ear and smiled back at her, and Aeris' heart did a flip in her chest. The golden light grew fainter until both it and the pair of wings disappeared altogether, and he was again the fairy she knew, back in his human form. "It's all around you." The brightness of his hair took longer to recede and she watched as it slowly returned to the more subdued blond she was used to seeing.

She stepped forward, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him.


	17. Chapter 17

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Seventeen**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

Zack let out a grunt as he drove the shovel straight into the ground, and brought the heel of his boot down upon it hard, pounding it deeper into the dirt. His chest heaving, he threw the ground a look of disgust and bit out harshly, "This is ridiculous."

His eyes swept over the other men gathered silently around the shaft, sweat pouring off of them despite the cool breeze, the same grim expressions on all their faces as though they were laying a body to rest inside the pit they'd dug.

Ivan sighed heavily, his face as red as his beard. "Take your time and enjoy your meal, boys. This hole will be waitin' for us come next year if we don't get back to it before then."

"Too bad it can't dig itself," Zack heard one of his neighbors grumble. "Save us the trouble, eh?"

There was a weak chuckle from another farmer but nobody else uttered a word.

Zack left the shovel standing straight out of the ground beside the hole and stalked off toward a tree set a ways from the others where he flung his hat onto the ground beside his lunchbox and sank down. Grabbing his canteen, he wet his handkerchief and began wiping his face and neck as Hans strode up toward the tree.

"What's got you in such a foul mood today?" The red-haired farmer asked, throwing his lunch sack carelessly onto the grass under the shade and flopping down beside it on his front with a grateful groan.

Zack tensed. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean," he said, his voice stiff.

"And I guess you haven't noticed how we've all been tripping over each other trying to keep our of your way the whole week either," his friend intoned dryly.

Zack looked blankly at him.

"What is it, Zack? What's been bothering you?"

"This." He jerked his head toward the hole. "All this...nothing but dirt and rocks...dryness." But that wasn't the whole truth. Zack knew Aeris was seeing the fairy again today. And to make matters worse, things at home had been cold. She was civil to him but distant, the warmth and laughter in her green eyes slightly cooled when she spoke to him. That, more than anything, certainly more than this wretched gods-forsaken ground, ate at him and gave him no peace.

Hans' forehead wrinkled. "It's no different than what we've been dealing with since we were boys."

"No, it's worse," Zack disagreed.

"It just seems that way. Our fathers probably felt as we do now back in their day." Hans had dragged himself up into a sitting position and was rifling through his lunch bag, an intent expression on his face.

"You know what's at the root of all this, don't you?"

"It's the land," Hans said easily. "And the weather doesn't help."

Zack shot the artless young farmer a look of disbelief. "It's more than the land."

Hans looked up from the bag. "You're not saying..."

"I am."

"I didn't think I'd ever hear that from you. Not seriously anyway."

"Maybe I've...seen something."

There was a slight pause. "I'd like to see one, too. Just once." Hans' voice was almost wistful.

Zack frowned. He would have expected such an answer from Tifa or Aeris or any other female, and maybe even some of his fellow men, but not his friend. "Be glad you haven't."

"You're lucky, Zack."

"I don't feel lucky," he muttered.

"I don't think they're bad."

"What makes you say that if you've never seen one?"

"Ma and Pa say so." Hans gave him a funny look. "Besides, I feel them watching me sometimes. Watching us. I never get the impression that it's with any ill intent."

Zack shook his head. "Maybe not. But I don't like the thought of them watching us freely at anytime and not knowing why."

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"There is a new name, or title, I should say, for the fairy queen that some humans have come up with recently. Have you heard of it?"

"A new title?" Golden eyebrows drew together. "No, I haven't."

"It has to do with her favorite form of punishment," Aeris said humorously. "Anyone who gets on her bad side is turned into a dung beetle."

"I take it it's not very flattering."

"No, not very."

"Then it's probably better not to tell me."

Her smile disappeared. "It is only said in jest, Cloud."

"Is it?" The fairy questioned. "It seems to suggest quite the opposite if you ask me. It is disrespectful, not to mention that it is clearly based on tales that are either fabricated or grossly exaggerated, and therefore, is unjustly earned and wrong."

Aeris was taken aback by the heat in his words. She contemplated his profile, noted that he kept his eyes firmly on the ground.

"I think you misunderstand," she said gently. "It is not meant as an insult. Not toward you or her or _any_ fairy."

"It is in poor taste. She does not like punishing anyone, human or fairy. How mean-spirited and ungrateful to mock her when she has done so much for mankind, and been nothing but kind and generous to them."

"She is greatly revered among humans." She placed a hand over his, waited until he met her gaze. "She is held in higher regard than many of our own kings and queens, past and present."

"Then you have an odd way of showing it."

"Respecting her has nothing to do with finding something about her to make light of. If you can't laugh at what you love, then how can you really say you love them? Laughter does not necessarily entail mocking. Of all things, I thought a fairy would understand that. It is simply that the punishment is something that comes up fairly often in the stories and someone eventually decided to have some fun with it. You must know of the stories."

"But she is not like that!" he exclaimed, and there was no question he was angry. He clearly viewed the title as nothing more than a criticism of their queen.

"They're stories," Aeris said hastily. "As you said, people exaggerate and embellish them with each telling so that over time, it's a wonder if a story bears anything more than a passing resemblance to its original tale. Still, her habit of turning people into beetles is quite common in the stories. The name is not completely without merit."

"She probably had a good reason for doing so." His voice had turned defensive. "She does not go around punishing people for the joy of it. Fairies aren't entertained by cruelty. The ones that were turned into beetles probably wouldn't learn their lesson, no matter how many chances she gave them and she had to resort to more drastic measures."

It distressed her to see him this visibly upset, but a small part of her was also annoyed that he could be so blindly loyal to someone he wouldn't know very intimately. "I realize that she is your queen but surely you can see that you wouldn't be in a position to know everything about her and say for certain what she would or wouldn't do in any given situation."

"But I do know her!" In contradiction to the tone of his voice, his face softened. "And she is as just and kind and loving as she is beautiful. She is the most beautiful fairy that has ever walked the earth and all that is good in this world. There has never been anyone like her and there will never be again."

"If she is as kind and just as you say she is, she wouldn't have this rule in place keeping humans and fairies apart," Aeris snapped. "It's absurd and it's things like it that prevent our species from learning about and understanding one another and living side-by-side in peace."

"She never does anything without a good reason." The fairy didn't seem to notice that she was striving to keep her own temper in check. "Mortals are always recounting stories about the queen cruelly punishing humans, but where are the stories about her generosity and kindness toward them? Blessing a barren couple with a child in their old age, making a rocky field yield crops for a family on the brink of starvation in winter, having a kindly farmer stumble upon a purse of gold coins in the plot of ground he's breaking—these are far more commonplace but we rarely hear humans tell them. Your own life has been touched by her kindness, but—" he stopped short, his jaw clenching as he turned away from her.

Aeris' anger vanished abruptly. "Kindness? What—what do you mean? What are you saying?" Her voice had taken on an urgent tone, as she sensed that there was something he wasn't telling her. "Everyone in the hills, every man, woman, and child... We've all known more than our fair share of struggle and hardship in this land. Sickness, drought, death, hunger, and more; whatever misfortune comes our way, we've learned to just take it all in stride. What kindness am I not seeing here?"

"I've already said too much," he said flatly.

"Cloud, please! I want to understand."

"If all humans see are the bad things in life, or fairies in this instance, and none of the good, then perhaps we are more different than I had thought. Maybe everyone else is right. Maybe we're the ones that are wrong." He rose to his feet. "I should go."

Aeris was also on her feet in an instant. "I've made you angry."

"Fairies don't feel anger, according to your stories," he reminded her.

"You are angry," she said unhappily. "Please, it was not my intention to upset you. I don't want us to part this way. Not with this between us." Afraid he would leave, she grabbed his arm, flinched at the pale eyes that swept toward her. She wished desperately now that she had heeded her own advice and not brought up the name Martha had given the fairy queen, but the last thing she wanted was to keep secrets from him, too. "Cloud," she implored him. "I am sorry I lost my temper. I've been...out of sorts lately but you are not to blame and I am not angry with you. I could never be angry with you. I should not have been so quick to say anything or question what has been since the world began. I was wrong. My anger and jealousy got the best of me and I said things I never meant."

His face remained impassive, the muscles in his arm rigid and unyielding under her fingers. "It doesn't matter—"

"No," she interjected, tightening her grip on him. "It does matter. And I was wrong to say what I did about the fairy queen. There is a reason why she is better known to us than anyone from our own race. She is a prominent figure in the stories of our youth, and for many of us, young and old, represents not just magic but wisdom and grace and everything that a ruler should be." Her eyes fell and her voice dropped to a whisper. "But I am not wrong in this. Not about us. Please tell me you don't really believe that you and I are wrong."

She felt the tension in his body slowly ease. "We've both had a lot on our minds. And you've probably been feeling it from all sides." A hard knuckle brushed a tear from her cheek. "It is just that...the queen has so much faith in mankind and it is hard to hear that she is being laughed at behind her back by the very people she protects." His arms closed about her and he lowered his head over hers, shielding her from further anguish and the pain of the last few days suddenly felt lighter to bear. "Forgive me, Aeris. I expected too much too soon from you."

Aeris lifted up on her toes, touched her forehead to his. "There is nothing to forgive." But when she looked into his eyes, she thought she saw sadness lurking in the blue depths that had come to mean so much to her in their relatively short acquaintance. "Cloud?"

"They..." He searched her face, his eyebrows knitted in a frown. "What Zack said before... He was not completely off the mark."

"No." She shook her head at him. "Don't let what anyone else says come between us."

"Now it is you who misunderstands." A faint smile appeared on his lips. "Wrong or right, I would want to be with you."

"Then that's all that matters."

She leaned forward to rest her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes, her body relaxing as she breathed him in. She could face anything, friends, neighbors, fairies, even her family, as long as she knew he felt about her as she did about him. But she wished the world wasn't so set on tearing apart something just because it didn't understand it.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"I'm glad one of us will finally have something to be happy about tonight," Tifa murmured, sawing her knife through a mushroom on the fallen tree. "One out of three isn't too bad." With any luck, Zack's pleasure upon being served his favorite mushrooms for dinner would help to relieve some of the strain in the house, particularly between her housemates. For two of the most good-natured and forgiving people she'd ever met, Tifa had never thought she'd see the day when they would be at odds with anyone, let alone with each other. Neither one would back down or admit they could possibly be wrong. "Maybe I can even get them to sit at the table long enough for us to do something together as a family tonight."

She tossed the oyster mushroom into one of the buckets she and Martha had brought with them into the forest, pushed the sweaty bangs off her forehead and scooted farther up the tree trunk, harvesting the mushrooms that had cropped up on just about every part of the tree not crushed against the earth. As she reached out to pull the bucket closer to her, a faint light from behind the bucket caught her eye.

"What's this?" She got on the ground on her hands and knees to get a good look under the tree, and sucked in her breath: a small purple cap with pink dots grew quietly in the shelter of a hollow in the dead tree.

Tifa eyed the strange toadstool warily, noticed there appeared to be some other illumination coming from underneath the mushroom hood. She pressed her face to the ground, trying to see what was emitting the light, but the mushroom was too low and the grass and weeds too tall, blocking her view of anything under the cap. She inched the knife in her hand forward—

"Don't touch that!"

A blur of sparkling ebony streaked past her and she felt a gust of wind on her clothes and hair, and the mushroom was gone.

Tifa blinked, and slowly sat up on her knees. Her eyes widened at the sight of the small, dark-haired waif clothed in nothing but leaves over her chest and groin, scowling fiercely at her over the mammoth tree trunk sprawled between them.

She licked suddenly dry lips as she rose cautiously to her feet. "You... You're one of them."

"This is my cousin's flower!" The girl stamped a foot hard, causing the flowers dangling from her hair to shake dangerously. "You are not to touch it!"

"I... It was a mushroom," Tifa hurried to explain. "There was no...f-flower..." Her voice trailed off as her eyes flitted toward the fairy's hands, but whatever was in them suddenly disappeared. "Was that what was under the mushroom? What did you do to it? Where did it go?"

The fairy jabbed a finger in her direction. "Humans are not allowed to touch my cousin's flower!"

"Whoa!" Tifa threw her hands up over her face for fear the wild creature would hex her. "Hold on there! I was not touching any flower!"

"I saw you!"

"Listen, child," Tifa tried to say in a soothing tone of voice. "I did not—"

"I am not a child!" The brown eyes glowed with an eerie light. "_Don't_ call me a child or I won't care what my cousin says and make you sorry."

"All right, all right. I won't." She held her hands out in a placating manner. She knew better than to argue with a fairy in an enchanted wood. "Please accept my most sincere apologies. I meant no offense. May I ask what your name is then?"

The fairy glared at her, but was apparently mollified by the apology as she did not fly into another rage as Tifa had assumed she would.

"Fine, you don't have to tell me your name if you don't want to. I don't suppose you'll tell me why you were following me either?"

"I was _not_ following you." The words were uttered with such derision and coming from such a young-sounding voice, it made Tifa flush. "I was following my cousin, but he eluded me again. He doesn't know that she knows and I have to..." she paused, eyes scanning the woods around them. "She has eyes and ears everywhere. But if anyone was watching you, they're long gone. You're no threat."

"Of course I wouldn't threaten anyone." Tifa looked nervously around herself, searching for the unseen eyes that had to be watching her from behind every shrub and tree. "Why would anyone think I would be a threat? Are you sure no one is watching me?"

The girl straightened her spine and lifted her chin. "I am the greatest tracker in these woods!" she announced. "Even my aunt says so. I can find anyone if I put my mind to it. I would know if someone else is here."

Except, as you yourself admitted, your cousin did manage to lose you, Tifa almost blurted out. But one look at the face raised haughtily in the air and she decided it would not be wise. She tried another tact. "Why are you following your cousin? Does someone mean to do him harm? Are you protecting him?"

"Do him harm?" The child, for she was clearly a child, despite her protestations, screeched. "No fairy would harm him, least of all his own mother! Only a human would harm him! Humans," she added contemptuously, crossing her arms over her chest. "You can't even see what's right in front of you, but you think you know everything. If I hadn't shown that friend of yours the way out of the forest just now, you would both be in here for weeks and weeks. But you're important to _her_ and my cousin is important to me. She already took him away from us. I will not let you take his flower, too!"

"I'm telling you, I wasn't taking anything."

"Yes, you were! I saw—"The fairy's eyes suddenly grew wide. She tilted her head to one side then the other, as though she was listening for something, and backed up a few steps. Pointing a finger at the dead tree then at the woods, she hissed, "Get what you came for and begone from here! These are her woods, not yours! You don't belong in here!"

"Wait!"

One moment Tifa was facing the fairy, and the next she was simply admiring a lone creamy white blossom on a branch drooping low to the ground.

"No emotions, my foot," she muttered, shaking her head.

"Tifa?"

The sound of her own name made her jump. Glancing dazedly around until she saw a blond figure standing behind her, it slowly sunk in that Martha had returned with the wheelbarrow she'd returned to the farm to fetch.

"Is something wrong?" Her friend was breathing heavily as though she'd ran the whole way. "Are you all right?"

Tifa pushed her hair out of her face, forced a smile. "I'm perfectly fine. Why do you ask?"

"Because you look like you've just seen a ghost," Martha said succinctly. "Did I hear you talking to someone?"

"Don't be silly." She waved a hand toward the bright white caps still covering nearly the entire lower half of the tree they'd discovered. "Ready to get back to work? We have a lot of farms to visit this afternoon."

"Yeah, sorry took me so long," Martha said, moving the wheelbarrow over to the tree. "I thought I was lost for sure back there. I didn't know we'd come so far inside the woods. Luckily, I saw one of the children playing just outside the trees. Though why he was running about without a stitch of clothing on, I can only guess." She gave a rueful chuckle. "Aeris says there's nothing to be frightened of, but I think I'll be glad just to get out of here."

"There's no need to worry about getting lost again." Tifa nodded in the direction the young fairy had pointed. "We just need to go straight that way."

"What?" Martha sounded astonished. "H-how do you know that?"

Tifa worked her knife back and forth through the base of a mushroom, careful to keep her eyes on the blade. "I've been here before. I remember this tree."

"Well, why didn't you tell me that before I went back to the farm?" Martha asked in exasperation.

She shrugged. "I thought you knew another way," she said, then froze as it suddenly hit her. "Cousins," she whispered. She smacked herself on the forehead. "Of course! Fairies. I should have known. She's _his_—"

"Tifa? What are you going on about? What's going on here?"

Her head shot up and she found soft, brown eyes watching her with gentle concern. She offered Martha an apologetic smile. "Sorry, I was just mumbling to myself." _Fairies_, she thought, her mind reeling from everything that just the word implied. Man had little use for them, but if one was foolish enough to appear before a human, Tifa didn't see why she should have any qualms about taking advantage of its abilities. "But you're right. The sooner we get out of the forest, the better."


	18. Chapter 18

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Eighteen**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"Zack and I were talking the other day, and I got this idea…" Tifa was saying doggedly at Aeris' heels as she herded the sheep into the barn and through the gate.

Dread filled Aeris, but she knew she had to give her friend the benefit of the doubt and hear her out. "Yes?"

Tifa took a deep breath. "It is said that fairies can grant wishes," she said, jumping nimbly out of the way for the shepherd girl to swing the gate closed behind the last sheep. "If you must have him, test him then. Test his feelings for you."

Aeris secured the latch and waited, her back still to Tifa. "How?" she asked quietly.

"Ask a wish of him. Ask him to help us and give us water. If he cares for you, he would do it," her housemate replied. "Aeris, think about it. Think about what you can do for everyone here. I wouldn't ask you but you're the only one who...who..."

"Who knows a fairy?" She turned and met Tifa straight in the eyes. Her lips twisted in self-deprecation at the mutinous look on her companion's face. "How foolish of me not to have taken him for everything he could give us. I forgot that the value of a person lies only in what he can do for you."

Tifa must have sensed her hidden doubts underneath the sarcasm. "That's it, isn't it?" she asked. When Aeris remained silent, she pounced. "You don't think he'll do it! He doesn't return your feelings. You love him but you don't know if he loves you. Here you have Zack, a wonderful, handsome young man who loves you, but it's not enough for you." Her voice turned hard. "Any other girl would give their arms and legs to have him look at them the way he looks at you, but you want the love of a fairy. A fairy who doesn't even care for you."

Every word Tifa uttered was like a knife stabbing her in the chest and all she could do was think of the way Cloud touched her. He could be so gentle, she thought, and the pain in her heart was almost enough to break. She could still see the look on his face the first time he traced his fingers down her cheek, skimmed over the buttons on her blouse, felt the ribbon in her hair, his hands trembling slightly and his eyes lit even brighter with wonder. She could hear the tremor in his voice, remember the brush of his lips on hers. And then there were times when they would get carried away and she could feel the need and heat burning through his body just as it did hers, and he would suddenly stop and just rest his forehead against hers and let their hearts and breathing slow to their normal rate.

"Zack may not love you the way you love this Cloud or want to be loved by him, but he does love you, in his own way," her housemate was saying. "A fairy's love is no better or more special than a human's love. And Cloud doesn't love you. He will never love you. You know that. I'm sure he would if he could, but he can't. He doesn't have the ability to love."

Tifa was wrong. Fairies were not completely without feelings. Aeris would bet her life on it. Despite the fears and doubts her friend's words had brought to the forefront, she refused to let them stand in the way of what she herself had learned about them and now knew.

Tifa saw that her words were falling on deaf ears.

"It's because he's a fairy, isn't it?" She peered closer into Aeris' face, eyes narrowing. "You want him because he's a fairy. And Zack being a normal, regular man without any magical powers can't compare to him in your eyes."

Before Aeris could reply, Tifa spoke again. "He's a fairy, and fairies are immortal. Where will you be in ten, twenty, or fifty years from now? He will be young forever. You won't be. What happens then?"

Stricken anew, Aeris lifted her chin and whispered, "It won't change how I feel about him."

Something flashed in Tifa's eyes before she wheeled about and made to leave. "Fine then," she said coldly. "But you saved his life. Why can't he help you now? Why can't you just ask him?"

But, Aeris thought despairingly as she stared at the barn entrance after Tifa left, she'd already asked him.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~ <strong>

"Would the young lad object to sharing his shade with a weary traveler?"

Zack looked up from his meat-pie, eyebrows rising at seeing an old woman with stooped shoulders standing over him. His irritation at having his solitude disturbed vanished abruptly as he set his pie down and moved over to make room for his unexpected guest under the rock he was sitting. "Please, sit down and rest your feet for a while, ma'am." He took her walking stick and bag from her, and helped her sit down.

"These old joints aren't as good as they used to be." She winced as she rearranged her stiff legs in a more comfortable position and leaned back against the cool stone behind them, inhaled deeply. "You picked a nice spot to have your lunch. A very nice spot indeed."

His eyes made a quick pass over the rock above them. Most of it was buried in the hillside, but the front end and parts of the underside and both sides were visible, unlike the two stones it rested upon, whose faces at their backs were the only parts that were left uncovered. He nodded curtly. "You must be hungry." He inclined his head at the food he'd unpacked and laid out on the grass. "Please help yourself. One man can't eat this much food by himself."

"Thank you, lad, but I still have a bit o' pasty that the baker's wife gave me," she said, patting her bag fondly. "But I am rather parched."

He passed his canteen to her and watched, bemused, as she nearly drained it.

"A heavy heart makes the day needlessly long and weary," said the woman, turning a pair of disconcertingly dark purple eyes upon him as she replaced the cork and handed the canteen back to him.

Zack glanced away, discomfited by the penetrating gaze that seemed to see too much. He picked up his pie only to set it down again, his thoughts in turmoil as it had been these last few days and yet there was a calm to them that hadn't been there before.

"Fickleness is not a quality a man desires in a wife." He felt her eyes still on him. "Or is it?"

He swiveled back around and stared at her. "I don't know," he said, and grimaced. He seemed to be saying that a lot lately. "That is to say, I don't know if she's fickle."

"Why do you want someone who has given her heart so readily to another?"

"I don't know for certain that she has," he began, but stopped short and raked his fingers through his hair as he heard himself repeating the same old line again.

"Those fellows...your friend, Hans. He worries about you." She tilted her head at where the other farmers were eating their lunch but she never took her eyes away from him.

Zack frowned. "Did they say that?"

"They didn't have to."

"I didn't see you with anyone else. Who were you talk—?"

"You doubt her and you doubt yourself."

He found himself wondering how the traveler had known what he was thinking and how she'd even happen to come his way when he'd deliberately sought out the shelter of the rocks to put some distance between himself and the other men.

As if she'd heard his thoughts, the old woman fell quiet and the two of them sat together in a strangely pleasant silence.

At length, she grabbed her walking stick and with some effort, pushed herself up onto her feet. "I must be on my way."

He glanced up, ashamed at once at the realization that he'd been a very poor host to her.

"Look inside yourself, Zack. The answer is in your heart." She accepted the bag he held up for her and placed her hand briefly on his shoulder. "You are a good man. You do your parents proud."

Zack nodded absently, his eyes drifting to the massive stones scattered about on the slope of the hill across from them and never noticed when the woman took her leave.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~ <strong>

A low growl from Daisy alerted Aeris from her troublesome thoughts, bringing her head up. Surprised pleasure flooded through her at the sight of the brunette climbing the hill toward her, her lovely face wreathed in smiles. She jumped to her feet and rushed forward to greet one of her oldest and dearest friends with the dog trailing her heels.

"Beatrix!"

They embraced one another warmly as Daisy ran happily around them in circles, apparently having come to the conclusion that their visitor was a good friend and not a predator of sheep.

"Good afternoon, Aeris. How have you been?" Beatrix was breathing heavily, two bright pink spots on her ivory cheeks. "Goodness," she continued breathlessly. "I thought my legs were gonna give out before I ever found you!"

"Oh dear," Aeris said in consternation. "Come." She took her hand and led her back to the tree. "It's cool here in the shade and I have plenty of water."

"Oh, no," Beatrix said dismissively as the two of them sat down and she removed her bonnet. "You don't live in the hills and not know to carry a waterjug whenever you leave your farm."

Aeris grinned. "Not that I'm not glad to see you, but what brings you so far out today?"

"I could ask you the same thing," Beatrix said wryly. "_You_ brought me out here. I was looking for you."

She gave her a quizzical glance.

"Aeris," Beatrix said, then hesitated. "I don't see you around anymore and... Why are you out so far by yourself?" she asked suddenly, in that blunt, forthright way of hers that most everyone would have found completely out of character except for the few who knew her best. "How are you not lost? I don't think I know how to get home!"

She chuckled. "I like it out here. It's isolated."

"You can say that again." Beatrix looked perplexed. "I'm amazed we haven't stumbled clear up to our necks in the sea!"

Aeris laughed. "We're nowhere near that far. Home is that way." She pointed northwest and brought her other hand up to her eyes, squinting a little into the distance. "See those three hills over there? They look almost identical save for the one in the middle that has a crown of trees. The farms are behind them, but a bit farther on. If you head toward them from here and climb to the top of any of those three hills, you will see your farmhouse. The route is much shorter than using Goliath or Titan as your guide," she said, referring to two of the biggest hills that every child knew to look for to help them find their way home.

Beatrix grabbed her hand and squeezed it hard. "Your reputation is well-deserved."

Aeris' smile faded. "You didn't come here just to tell me that."

Her friend gave a rueful shake of her head, brown curls bouncing. "I never could hide anything from you when we were children. I don't know why I thought I could now."

"That and you coming out here when I'm not anywhere near your family's farm gave you away."

Beatrix smiled weakly. "Yes, there is that. It feels like I haven't seen you for ages."

"Bea."

"People..." she began haltingly. "There's been talk going around..."

"Talk?" Aeris inquired. "About me?"

"No!" The other girl was swift to deny. "Of course not! It's just...talk."

"Talk about what then?"

"About this place." Beatrix gestured to the landscape and let out a sigh of frustration. "You know how it is. Everyone's always talking about all the odd things going on around here. About everything and nothing."

She nodded in understanding. "I think it would be more odd if there was _nothing_ odd going on around these parts."

"Well, yes, that's true," Beatrix allowed. "But I suppose I meant more talk than the usual. So I came looking for you because I was worried. I don't like the thought of you being out here alone. I never did."

Was that a warning Aeris heard in her voice? Whatever it was, it gave her pause. "I'm all right."

"I guess I should have known," the brunette said with a wistful smile. "You have Zack and Tifa now and maybe you don't really need company while you're out with the sheep, but perhaps... you can use an old friend. I... I just came to see you really."

Her words moved Aeris and it suddenly struck her how long it had been since she last saw Beatrix, or any of their neighbors for that matter. "I can always use an old friend."

Beatrix gave her hand another squeeze. "Aeris, take care. Please take care. Be careful."

"I will," Aeris said with a touch of surprise. "Thank you."

"Whatever happens, I want you to know that I have faith in you and I will stand by you." Beatrix's voice trembled but she smiled, her old, trusting smile that Aeris remembered so clearly from their childhood days and she knew everything would be all right. "I know you."


	19. Chapter 19

**~A Wild Heart~ **

**Chapter Nineteen**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"You're quiet today."

"I've had a lot on my mind," Aeris admitted.

The fairy didn't press her, but simply waited for her to go on.

"I've been thinking," she began reluctantly. "Is there nothing we can do? First, the river, then the wells. Now you tell me the people on the other side of the forest are building their settlements toward the stream and dirtying the water wherever they go. Is it not something that can be changed?"

"That is up to the people living up north. Perhaps when their living conditions get to the point that their very survival is at risk, they will choose to live more wisely."

"By then, they won't have any other choice."

"No, I don't suppose they will."

"Can't you do anything? Won't you help us?"

He was silent for a long moment. "It is not my place to intervene in human matters."

"Not even if I ask you to?"

"It is forbidden."

"What about wishes?"

Cloud's forehead knitted in a frown. "What about them?"

His lack of enthusiasm was hardly encouraging, but she had come this far and couldn't back down now. "What if you grant me a wish?" she asked. "In the case of wishes, fairies are allowed to interfere in human matters, aren't they?"

His eyes searched hers, as if to make sure she was serious. "If only it were that easy. We could just wish that humans would stop harming the earth. But that's not the way it works. Wishes won't do any good in the long run. The problem will just come back, bigger and more difficult than before, along with all the other problems that will have come out of granting the wish. Someone else fixing your troubles for you will not make things any better if you don't learn from your mistakes and put forth the effort to resolve your own problems or prevent them from happening again, and you will regret the wish someday. Throughout history, humans have always shown that they have to learn things the hard way."

"But we have learned. We're not as wasteful as we were before," Aeris tried to reason. "If I could ask a wish of you, I'd wish for you to help us find water."

"You got this idea from somewhere else." His expression did not change but she thought she heard an edge in his voice. "This didn't come from you."

Disheartened, she looked away. "I'm sorry," she said. "I won't ask again."

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"A little bird told me someone here saw something."

"Oh?" Tifa asked, trying to pretend an indifference she didn't feel at her visitor's words. "You'll have to help me out here, Letty. Did this little bird also happen to say who it was and what it was that he or she saw?"

"Well, yes and no. But from what I gather and what with the rumors going around, I daresay it's pretty clear who it was. Zack."

Luckily for Tifa, her neighbor's gaze had fallen upon the vegetables on the table and so she did not see the startled look on her face. She moved around the table slowly, perusing the small harvest as Tifa finished crimping her pie and set it aside.

"I see your garden's still putting food on your table." Leticia selected a zucchini and cocked a brow at Tifa.

Tifa gave an impatient nod. "Please, take what you need."

She beamed. "Thank you, dear."

"About what Zack saw..." Tifa prompted.

"Eh?" Letty murmured absently, picking another zucchini and dropping it inside her basket. "Oh, that. Right. Supposedly, he saw something extraordinary from the forest...or in the forest, can't really say I remember which."

"I see." Tifa's response was curt, but the other woman appeared oblivious to it. "If he did see something, I doubt anyone of us would really call it extraordinary. We all think we see things from time to time, do we not? And some of us _do_ see things."

"Exactly so," Letty agreed brightly. "But I think this time it might be...different."

"Different?" she echoed. "What makes you say that?"

"Because it sounds like there's more to it than what he's told his friends. But what is he not telling them? And why?"

"I don't get it!" Tifa burst out. "I don't see what all this fuss is about! Even if he had seen something, he wouldn't be the first person to have done so and he definitely won't be the last! Who knows how many people have seen things but are smart enough to keep their traps shut?"

Leticia's eyebrows shot up to her hairline. "No one's making a fuss, Tifa. We are just worried, as good neighbors ought to be. Our families look out for one another, do we not?"

Desperate, she cast about for something to throw her visitor off of Zack's scent. "Well, then, maybe you should worry about me! Remember when Martha and I brought you those mushrooms? I thought I saw a fairy in the forest then! In fact, I'm sure of it! She was standing in front of me, as close as you are now, and then she...wasn't there."

Letty dismissed her confession with a wave of her hand. "That's nothing to get excited about. You just came across her by accident, right, lass?"

It was not at all the reaction Tifa had been expecting. "Y-yes..." She gaped at Ivan's wife. "A-as it was with Zack, I'm sure."

"But you weren't with him, were you?"

"I didn't have to be. We grew up together."

"That doesn't mean anything. A man can have secrets, even from his wife."

"Not from me, Zack doesn't," Tifa insisted stubbornly. "I know him better than anyone else. If he saw anything, believe me, I'd be the first person he'd tell."

"That's a shame," Letty said. "I thought, _hoped..._he might have a hunch about when they might show up."

Tifa frowned at the strange answer and chewed her lower lip. Zack had no such knowledge about the comings and goings of fairies, but there was someone else who was on intimate terms with one of them who did. But Tifa was not about to make things worse at home by telling a woman who had a fascination for all things fairy about Aeris' unusual beau. "Was it Ivan who told you about Zack? Did he send you here?"

"Goodness, no." Letty gave a little laugh. "Ivan wouldn't concern himself with such matters and he doesn't really believe in these things, whatever he says. It was Dottie."

"Dottie!" Tifa exclaimed. "But...what-who told her—?"

"Jason, of course," she said, as though it should be obvious. "Men talk at home and women pick up on things that _they_ don't. And I think she might have said she's been talking to Aeris too. My dear girl, don't look so worried. I'll just tell Dorothy she and Jason have got nothin' to worry about. And Lizzie and my own Anna, too, of course, and Fanny and..."

Dottie and Jason, Tifa thought dazedly, barely listening as their neighbor prattled on cheerfully. She hadn't even realized the two were good friends. But Letty was right about one thing. Men talked and women picked up on the talk. She twisted her apron between her fingers uneasily, anxious for her housemates to come home.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"Why, Aeris? Why do you keep on meeting this-this fairy?"

"Zack..." She gazed helplessly at the young man who had apparently followed her again to the old well without her being aware of it.

"You have to stop this! What will people think—?"

The air seemed to shimmer and wave, and in a flash of blinding silver light, a woman stood before them.

Even without the glow or wings of her true form, the perfection of her face and figure was a sight to behold—she was what legends were made of. A being of such radiance and dazzling beauty, Aeris could only stare open-mouthed while Zack was shocked into silence. The woman was small and fine-boned, but she had a presence that made her seem much taller and grander, and an air about her that commanded deference and respect despite the fact that she had not uttered a single word. With hair the color of moonbeams and eyes a tawny gold, there was no mistaking who she was. In the tales, there was only one fairy who fit that description and she had been in the stories almost since man first discovered fire. The most beautiful fairy of all.

And the most powerful.

She was the very last person anyone, human or fairy, would want to cross.

"Mother?" The fairy standing beside Aeris was the first to speak, breaking her out of the spell that had robbed her of speech. "What are you doing here?"

"Enough, son." The woman's voice was soft and light, but had a quality to it that gave one no doubt she was used to issuing orders and being obeyed. "This nonsense must cease today."

"M-mother?" Aeris squeaked.

"The fairy queen?" Zack choked out.

"This has gone on long enough," the fairy went on, speaking to the blond figure alone. "Because you are my son, I looked the other way but your continued open defiance has caused a stir among the other fairies. Concerns and questions of favoritism have begun to reach my ears and I cannot ignore your behavior any longer." Without warning, the golden gaze turned toward Aeris, who was so flustered that the fairy queen had deigned to look at her, her thoughts immediately scattered and her voice left her again. She tore her eyes away from that perfect countenance only to have them alight upon the flower woven into the pale hair above a fine, pointed ear that gleamed like it was made of drops of golden sun. "Hear me, mortal." The voice had taken on an imperious note. Unable to resist the pull in it, Aeris returned her gaze to the queen's face and found herself suddenly powerless to move, her eyes locked with a pair of glowing amber ones, her feet rooted to the ground. "I am deeply indebted to you for saving my son's life and I would gladly give you anything you want. Anything but him. Him I cannot give. Ask anything else of me and it will be yours." Her eyes glittered with something Aeris couldn't quite put her finger on and then she wasn't thinking anymore, only listening and yielding. "I can grant you the wish you asked of him the other day if you like. Just say the words and it shall be done. But you must stop seeing him. There is much about fairies that you do not know. Our two races are far more different than you think. If you persist in this, know that you will bring doom to him and grief to all of us."

Aeris opened her mouth to obey, but another voice spoke up first. "Stop it, Mother." The voice was cold, harsh, jarring Aeris from the warm, pleasant atmosphere the queen's voice had lulled her into. "Release her this instant. You will not compel her against her will."

Aeris blinked rapidly and shook her head, trying to clear the fog in her head.

"She has done nothing wrong." Cloud sounded furious as he had never before. "You have no right to do this. Just because you are the queen does not mean you can interfere with her life or mine."

"I come, not as the queen but as your mother." The way she turned and gave him all her attention suggested Aeris and Zack might not have been there for all the notice she took of them. "And as your mother, I have every right to look after you. It is my right and my duty to take care of you, even if you think you no longer need it." Cloud looked like he was going to say something to that but she spoke again, her voice soft once more, entreating, not at all like a queen but a doting mother with her dearly loved, if recalcitrant, child. "My son, we both know this cannot end well for you."

"No," he said, but his face, too, had softened and there was no trace of anger left in his voice. "We don't know that."

"Yes, we do. A human and a fairy have no chance of being together to speak of."

"That's not true," he countered, and Aeris saw surprise flit across the fairy queen's face and doubt flicker briefly in the golden depths of those lovely eyes. "Do you think I don't know the truth, Mother? You're not the only one with secrets. I have the gift, too. I know what Grandmother and the others like her saw in the sky on the night I was born. I've known of it since I was a little boy."

His mother looked sharply at him, the look in her eyes like pain. "You are still a little boy," she said, and there was a tremor in her voice. "My little boy. Yes, you've grown up, much too soon and far more quickly than our kind normally do, but you still have a lot of growing and learning to do, and I will always do everything I can to protect you."

"Even if that means hiding the truth from me?"

At her son's unrelenting stare, the queen gave a sigh of defeat. "Perhaps it was wrong of me, but I was just trying to shield you from what can only cause you pain."

"That is for me to decide, Mother." His voice lowered and although Aeris could detect no hint of anger or threat in it, the fairy queen's face paled at his next words. "I know that there is a way. I know it can be done."

"My son, do not speak so lightly of such things. Just hearing you utter them is breaking my heart." The queen held a hand out to him beseechingly. "You've felt it. You don't know what it is but a part of you recognizes it. We all do. The earth resounds with the loss of fairies before you who have forsaken all for the love of a mortal and the rest of us have to live with the emptiness and sorrow that their choices have inflicted upon us forever. No matter what you do, you will be the one to suffer. I cannot let you do this."

"I do know what it is. Deep down, I think I always suspected it, and Father finally admitted it when I asked him." The fairy queen's shoulders sagged and the hand she proffered to him fell as Cloud continued, "I went to him on the eve of my fifth birthday and he revealed everything to me. I've known of it and the truth about me for twelve years. Mother, I've been watching the stars my whole life, waiting for everything that has been foretold to happen."

"And I have been dreading it," the queen said quietly. "Oh, I have been dreading it. I know of your gift. I knew of it on the morning you were born because of the flowers that appeared at your birth. And when the ash chose to bind itself to you, I wanted to fade. It was the only time I have ever felt that way. And it may have been poorly done of me but I fought it, tried to deny it, did everything to keep you from discovering your gift or learning what your grandmother saw, but I see now it was all for naught."

"You can't protect me forever, Mother."

She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath before opening them again. "If it was within my power, I would do whatever it takes to make this happen for you. But it is out of my hands. It is out of both of our hands. If you know everything else, you must know that as well." She looked at her son and held her hand out again. "Love, you've never doubted me. Will you not believe me now and trust me in this?"

His body visibly relaxed, but his face was still uncertain. "Mother…" he took a step toward her and hesitated. Glancing back at Aeris, he ran a hand through his hair in indecision. "Aeris…"

Aeris gazed back at him in silent anguish. She didn't know what had just transpired but she sensed that it had been very important.

"Come." His mother beckoned him. "We can talk about this at home."

Aeris' foot slipped forward but a hand suddenly clamped around her arm, holding her back.

"Don't be foolish," Zack murmured in her ear. "That's the fairy queen. We have no business meddling in the affairs of their kind."

The bright blue eyes holding Aeris' never wavered. Cloud gave an almost imperceptible nod before he turned back to his mother. She took another step...

The hand on her arm tightened like a vise. "Let him go."

"Cloud…" His name was but a whisper as she watched him take the fairy queen's hand and the two of them vanished.

"It's time to end all of this," Zack said flatly.


	20. Chapter 20

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Twenty**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"Zack, Aeris, we need to talk."

Tifa saw Aeris' mouth tighten as she set her staff by the door and hung her cloak on a wall hook. Her eyes slid to Zack who was sitting at the table, staring mutely at a grain in the wood as he had been doing since he came home.

"Can we do this later?" Aeris placed her hat on top of her cloak and swept down the hall toward her room with her basket.

"Aeris!"

The shepherd girl spun around, eyes flashing with green fire. "Why don't you just talk to Zack?" she asked tightly. "Maybe he has something he'd like to share with you. In fact, he might even want to tell you about how he followed me again this morning."

Tifa glanced back and forth between her housemates but neither one seemed inclined to talk. She let out a sigh of exasperation. "Look, whatever happened this morning, you'll just have to sort it out between the two of you whenever you're ready to do so. I don't really care—"

"No, you wouldn't."

The resentment in the other girl's voice made Tifa's own temper flare. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means that Zack can do no wrong in your eyes. If it had been him meeting with a fairy and I was the one who had followed him, you would still side with him."

"I wouldn't!"

"Yes, you would." Aeris gave a bitter laugh. "We both know you would."

"Fine," Tifa retorted hotly. "So what if I would? That is neither here nor there. Just remember, he is not the one seeing a fairy. _You_ are."

"How could you—"

"I didn't follow you." The words were sullen, reluctant, as if they'd been dragged out of him.

"No?" Aeris turned on Zack. "Then how did you happen to be where no one else ever goes and where you know I've met him before?"

"I followed you, but not the whole way. I knew you would be meeting him, so I just waited at the old Miller farm until I saw you coming up the road and_ then_ I followed you. If you had looked up, you would have seen me. I wasn't trying to hide."

"You couldn't have said something or made a sound?"

"I thought you always look where you're go—"

"All right, that's enough, both of you!" Tifa said sharply, annoyed at the pair of them. "This is not why I wanted us to talk. There is gossip going around, rumors of people seeing things they shouldn't..."

Aeris shrugged. "There is little else to do besides gossip out here."

"You don't understand. I had a visitor this morning."

She saw both her companions stiffen. "A visitor." There was an arrested expression on Aeris' face. "As in..."

"No," she said quickly. "Not that kind of visitor. Letty. She was asking questions."

"Why? What kinds of questions? What did you tell her?"

Tifa was stung. "I didn't tell her anything."

"They should just mind their own business."

Tifa felt her jaw drop. She could hardly believe her ears. "I'm tired, Aeris," she said, rubbing her eyes and resisting the urge to also rub her ears. "I'm tired of having to watch every little thing I say around people we've known all our lives and who are like family because now we can't trust anyone anymore. I'm tired of worrying that every time someone opens their mouths, they're going to say they've found out and worrying about what they will do. It's not fair that you've gotten us into this situation and now we have to lie to help you keep this fairy a secret."

"I didn't want this either," Aeris said fiercely. "I never wanted to put you into a position like this. Do you think I like it any more than you do?"

"But you made the choice to see him. Zack and I, we didn't have any say in this."

"And you, Zack? Is that how you feel too? Do you agree with Tifa?"

Zack's eyes fell back to the table. "You always knew how I feel about this."

Aeris closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them again, defiance burned brighter than ever in the green pools. No, not defiance. It was something else. Something Tifa could not name or she would be acknowledging the very thing she had been taught was forbidden.

"It was never up to either of you who I choose to see or meet. If you would have left it alone, left _me_ alone, none of this would be happening now." The same emotion she saw in Aeris' eyes was in her voice. Tifa met her squarely in the eyes, refusing to back down from it.

"We were worried about you," Zack said quietly. "How could we have known what was really going on?"

"Regardless of our part in this matter, you are putting all of us in danger by seeing him," Tifa pointed out.

"How?" Their housemate challenged. "Will we be rounded up and burned at the stake? By who? The neighbors?"

Tifa shivered. "Don't let anyone hear you say that."

"You're being silly. We're done talking here."

"Ask yourself this then, Aeris," Tifa said loudly, stopping her in her tracks again. "If you're not afraid, why haven't you told anyone about him? Why not just tell everyone and be done with it? Admit it, you know what you're doing is wrong and you're scared of what the consequences might be."

"It is not wrong to love someone just because he is not human. He is still a man. And I'm not afraid for myself, Tifa. Not like that. I'm afraid..."

"Of what? Are you afraid for him? Do you think anyone could hurt him? Even if they wanted to, he's a fairy!"

Aeris looked steadily at her. "You know what frightens me even more? The fact that harming him is the first thing that came to your mind. I was only going to say that I feared everyone would disapprove, like you and Zack do, and try to come between us. I was afraid I would never get to see him again..." She shook her head. "Did I ever know you at all?"

Tifa flushed as Aeris stormed off. Heaving a deep sigh, she pulled a chair back from the table and plopped down with a heavy thud.

After a long moment of silence, she raised her head to look at Zack. "Well, that went well," she said at last, shooting him a rueful grin. "What a mess."

He didn't return the smile. "Considering who his mother is, I doubt anyone could hurt him anyway," he scoffed.

Tifa was completely lost. "Wait..." she said weakly. "What does his mother have to do with this?"

"She's the fairy queen."

Tifa gaped at him in horror. "The... Did you say the _fairy queen_?" she asked in a strangled whisper.

"He never even told her about his mother." His mouth drew into a thin line. "She didn't know who she was."

Tifa groaned and hid her face behind her hands. "This is only getting worse and worse." A sudden thought occurred to her—she dropped her hands, stared across the table at Zack. "What was she like? Did she look anything like the stories say?"

He scowled at her. "I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"I see she did," she said wryly, amused despite herself. But their troubles came rushing back, rejecting any attempt to be held at bay. "Zack, what are we going to do? The neighbors are going to find out. What then? We can't protect her. We won't be able to."

"We have to stop her."

_"How?"_

He let out a sigh. "I wish I knew, Tifa. I wish I knew."

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

For three days Aeris didn't see him. There were no flowers in the morning but she still made the trip to the old well. It was not the first time he hadn't come but she felt this time it was different. His mother had convinced him, she thought despairingly, staring at the peeling white paint of her windowsill for the third day in a row. On the fourth mourning, when she forced herself out of bed and discovered a small white lily just beginning to flower lying on her window, she wept silent tears of joy.

But three days of worry had taken their toll on her, and on him, too, it seemed. Neither spoke much and although she knew he was a man of few words, she could tell there was more to his reticence this time. Desperate, she attempted to start a conversation several times but couldn't find much to talk about and when she did it was of trivial matters. The events of their last meeting and the abrupt way it had concluded hung between them like a herd of elephants they were both trying their best to pretend was not there.

"You're just like her," she finally blurted out the matter on both of their minds. "Aren't you?"

He knew exactly what she was getting at. "My mother and I are just ordinary fairies."

The splendid creature Aeris had beheld on the outskirts of the forest was anything but ordinary. And the same was true for him, whose perfect features were second to none.

"She is the queen of the fairies."

"Being a queen is as much a burden as it is an honor. You are bound by countless duties that most are lucky not to have."

"She is very beautiful," Aeris said softly. She could hardly be blamed for thinking that the love and admiration that appeared on his face were genuine, or being transfixed by how it made what was already an astoundingly stunning visage doubly so.

"I certainly think so."

"Any woman who stands beside her pales in comparison."

The smile on his face faded. "I think you are as beautiful as she is."

Her heart skipped a beat.

He brought his hand up and she saw that he was holding a small blue flower, its delicate petals just barely fluttering in the breeze.

"Where did you get that?"

"Here."

"I didn't see it—"

The fairy brushed back a few strands of loose curls from her face and tucked the flower into her hair. "Shall I tell you the story of the moon-gazer?"

"The moon-gazer?"

"It's the name of the flower." Strong hands stroked her hair gently. There was so much power in those hands but when he touched her, all she felt was safe, protected, and deeply cherished. "Would you like to hear it?"

"I would love to."

"It is an old tale that has been told to every fairy in the cradle since before man walked the earth," he began. "When you look up at the moon, what you don't know is that she is not alone. She has an infinite number of companions with her at all times. They are quite small, even by our standards, and thus, cannot be seen from this distance. Except for their light. It is on the nights when they come out from behind their mistress to dance merrily about her that the face of the moon looks brightest for they, too, are filled with the light of the heavens."

Aeris listened, completely mesmerized by his voice and the magic in the words of the tale he told.

"'Tis said that at the dawn of the world, when the moon was passing through the sky, some of these companions became so enamored with the new world they saw that they rushed forth to explore it and did not heed her cries for them to stop. They fell to the earth and were banished forevermore from the sky. And so, they became the first forms of life to appear on this planet. But they were not of this world and were not meant for it. As the sun rose in the eastern sky, its overly bright rays drove the moon before him in its path and her companions on the ground began to fade with the light of the moon as it slowly disappeared over the edge of the world. When she made her way back around to them once more, her tears fell upon the place her companions were last seen and where her tears fell, tiny, bright lights began to grow out of the ground.

"The flowers don't need the mushrooms to give off light. In fact, it is said that the mushrooms have achieved the ability to emit light because of the flowers they have taken under their protection. The moon never left. Each day after the sun has made his journey over the planet, she follows him and takes her turn across the night sky and looks down on the planet, and the flowers look to her face but they are ashamed and so they hide under the mushroom caps and only peer out at her." A rare smile crossed his face, brilliant blue eyes aglow with a look she was very accustomed to seeing now as they skimmed over her face. "They yearn for their mistress and won't forget where they come from. They are eternal. For every flower that gets picked, another one grows. Their number has remained unchanged since the beginning and will remain so even unto the end of the world."

In the hushed silence that followed, Aeris could hear her heart beating, each thump in her chest painful to bear.

"Aeris?" His voice was soft, a balm to the pain in her heart and in her soul. "What's wrong?"

She swallowed the lump in her throat. "To be separated forever..." she whispered. "I can't imagine."

He caught her hand in both of his, squeezed it gently. "But they're not truly separated."

Her heart still ached, but she lifted her other hand to cover his, gave him an answering squeeze.

When dusk came and she kissed him farewell, tears seeped out from under her eyelashes.

"Aeris?"

He pulled back, stared at her in consternation.

"I'm just so happy we met." She smiled at him through her tears and only kissed him again.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"She's seeing him today. Look at her." His gaze remained fixed on the back of the shepherd girl leaving with her flock.

"It's the flowers," he hears her murmur at his back.

"What are you talking about? What flowers?"

"The flowers, the wild lilies. She has vases full of them in her room but she only comes home with them sometimes."

Zack's jaw clenched. "You think he's giving..."

"Yes. And...since she's so happy this morning, my guess is she just got another one."

He curled his fists. "How... Why does she keep...?" With a groan, he let his head fall back, closed his eyes.

"I don't know, Zack. I don't understand her either." Behind him, he heard Tifa's footsteps retreat further back into the room. "But where he goes, another is sure to follow."

Zack expelled a long, painful breath and opened his eyes. "Sorry?" Turning, he saw her at the table, wrapping a slice of pecan pie for his lunch. "What did you say?"

"Nothing. I was just thinking out loud."

"That's a bad habit in a place like this," he tried to jest.

"Not much choice when I only have the animals for company." The smile on her face didn't quite reach her eyes. "I wish this was a raspberry cake, Zack," she said apologetically.

He spared the pie a glance and looked back up at her with a smile that was more sincere. "Pecan will do just fine," he reassured her.

"Say, Zack, have you ever thought...wondered...if maybe...?"

"Wondered what?" Zack asked quizzically, looking into her pretty face, her brown eyes worried. "What are you thinking? Spit it out, Tifa."

"I know this might sound silly but what if we... what if there was a way we could undo all of this?"

It was a question he'd asked himself a million times and still didn't have an answer for. A word dropped here, a sentence there, carefully thought out lest they roused suspicion, but there too, he'd been defeated—trying to pick the minds of his friends and neighbors had yielded ideas that were questionable at best. "How? How would we even do that? Catch him and ask him nicely to stop seeing her? What if that doesn't work? Should we threaten him or hurt him? How would we even catch him in the first place? It's not like she'd give us a helping hand."

"No, not that. Aeris would never forgive us if we hurt him. But there might be someone else who could undo all of this."

"Someone else?" His eyes narrowed. "Tifa, what are you not telling me?"

"I... Nothing," Tifa said hastily. "I was just being foolish. Forget I said anything."

* * *

><p><strong>Note:<strong> This is just a little note of apology to the readers. I realize this chapter took me a while to write, but there have been some exciting changes in my life and I am sorry to say that updates may continue to be slow for a while. Time is more limited than ever. However, this story will be finished, I promise all of you that. I have the last chapter written. Unfortunately, I just need to flesh out all the other chapters in between (which is a lot more work than I initially thought) because I definitely don't want to be cutting out certain things from it just because I want to finish this up. Happy reading and I hope to see you all around!


	21. Chapter 21

**~A Wild Heart~**

**Chapter Twenty-One**

**~~~ooooo~~~**

"I was thinking about what you said the other day."

His voice was mild, amiable even, but Tifa knew better.

"What did I say?" She tried to ask conversationally, scrubbing at the grease in the pan with more vigor.

"You said something about where one goes, another one follows."

"I thought you didn't catch that."

Zack shrugged.

She waited patiently.

He didn't disappoint her. "It gave me an idea."

"I don't think I like where this is going."

"Tifa, why should we catch someone else to undo this mess?"

"Zack." She sucked in her breath. "What are you saying? What have you done?"

"Nothing."

"Yet." Her stomach twisted, turning into knots. The brush fell into the bucket with a splash as she set the pot aside, rose from her stool. She dried her hands on her apron and slowly approached him where he sat at his mother's old dining table that had been relocated into the kitchen when the girls had first arrived on the farm and she decided a bigger table would be necessary. "Tell me what you're thinking."

Zack's eyes were fixed on the table top as if it was a deeply complex puzzle he was trying to solve. "I have a plan."

"Dear gods. Aeris—"

"We won't hurt him, Tifa. I've given it a lot of thought and it's the safest way for all of us. The only way. And Aeris..." He looked up, met her gaze head on. "Well, she'll never have to know."

Her eyes passed over his face, taking in the pale, withdrawn features, the desperation in the deep blue eyes. Tifa felt her heart squeeze.

"All right," she said with a sigh of resignation. "What is your plan?"

His eyes turned wary. "Maybe...it's better if you don't know the details either."

"Zack!"

"I don't want you to worry or make things worse at home."

"You not telling me what you're up to makes me worry more."

"Just trust me. We won't hurt him, I promise."

"Oh, Zack."

She had a very bad feeling about this.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"I tried to warn you."

"You!" Aeris shot to her feet so fast, she nearly stumbled and had to use her staff to keep from losing her balance. She glanced wildly around her but other than the sheep and the dogs, she and the young fairy were alone.

"Yes, me," the girl answered. "He's not here. I made sure he left."

She took an instinctive step back, but forced herself to stop and stand her ground when she saw the fairy's eyes gleam with triumph. "What do you want?" she asked, bracing herself for an attack or a temper tantrum from the hellion.

"Not much." Black lashes lowered, concealing any mischief that might be lurking in the dark eyes. "Just two dozen lambs, three scores of laying hens, both your mules, the cows, a pair of oxen, your farm, two men to work the farm... Oh, and your firstborn child."

Aeris gaped at her. Why, the little thief... "You—" she sputtered.

"Isn't that what you were expecting me to say?" The impertinent girl chirped. "Do you not value my cousin enough to trade all your possessions for?"

She could only shake her head in disbelief. "None of what you want is mine to give." She didn't even know where or how she would acquire half the things on the list.

"And if they were?" She leaned forward. "Would you?"

Aeris' brows furrowed. "Does Cloud know you're here?" she asked warily.

The fairy ignored her question. "My aunt is not happy with you. The other fairies are not happy with you."

Unlike the younger girl, Aeris could not brush aside her words or pretend they had no effect on her. Completely stricken, she dropped her gaze and hung her head. "I am sorry," she whispered.

"You could change that."

Her eyes flew up to the brown ones watching her from under a pair of ink black brows.

"No," she stated. "I can't. I won't."

"I thought you'd say that." The scorn on the girl's face was plain to see. "My cousin says you're different. But you're not. You're just like every other human out there."

"Yes," Aeris replied. "I suppose I am. I can love. And I love him."

"You think you know all about love, don't you? You think you are wiser than fairies who have lived for over a thousand years. You think you are better than us!"

"I do not think I am more wise than a fairy." Nervous at the fairy's small outburst, she moistened her lips and said somberly, "I do not believe I am better than a fairy at anything at all. I may not get to live for centuries like fairies do but what time I have been given on this earth, I will spend it loving him. It is not because I think I know what love is that I say this but because I know my heart. He is in my heart. He _is_ my heart." A small, bittersweet smile curved her lips. "That will never change."

The girl tilted her head. "Even if you could live hundreds of years?"

Aeris' chuckle was rueful. "Even if."

"Even if you could live as long as the queen?" she persisted. "You would love him like she does?" Her eyebrows rose in challenge. "She loved him long before he was born."

"Longer."

"Do you even know how old she is?"

"It makes no matter. I would love him still."

"I could fix that." The words were uttered softly, but cold fear suddenly gripped Aeris' heart like a fist and every muscle in her body locked into place.

She stared into the unflinching dark eyes in anguish. "Cloud..."

"He's not here to help you."

"He will never forgive you." It was beyond her ken that someone so young could be so ruthless. "_I_ will never forgive you."

"Your feelings are of no consequence to me." The girl shrugged her narrow shoulders. "But...you are fortunate I was only testing you, to see how you would react. But know this, if you should ever give me a reason to doubt you, I will do what I have to. Cloud wouldn't like it but he'd understand. He's not the kind that really gets angry but even if he does, we're cousins. He can't stay mad at me for long."

"That's where you're wrong," a voice said sternly.

Aeris' entire body went limp with relief as a golden blond figure revealed himself behind the fairy, who gave a yelp and swung around, eyes widening with shock.

"Not only do you overstep your boundaries, you underestimate what she is to me."

"You can't really care about this hu—" She cringed as he turned his icy gaze upon her.

He strode toward Aeris and swept an arm around her waist, tugged her against him. It wasn't until she felt his hands moving up and down her back reassuringly and she collapsed against him that she realized she was shaking like a leaf.

"C...Cloud," she moaned weakly into his chest. "You came back."

His jaw was set and his eyes cold but she took comfort in knowing she was not the object of his displeasure.

"When I saw she wasn't following me, I came back. I knew she was up to something."

"You...you were watching us?" His cousin sounded outraged. "How could... How did you hide from me?"

"There are a lot of things you have yet to learn," he said tersely. "And as for you, that's enough mischief from you for today."

"I wasn't going to do anything," she protested. "I just wanted to see what she would do."

"Believe me, that is the only reason why I haven't taken you to task for your meddling. Be glad I was listening or you would know firsthand how truly angry I can get." The younger girl opened her mouth but she must have seen something in his face that made her think twice about it as she immediately snapped it shut again. "Go home. Your mother will be looking for you. I will deal with you later."

She nodded meekly and spun on her heels.

"Wait!" Aeris' voice quavered but she could not let the fairy leave without getting some answers. "You came to stop me," she said to her back. "But... You changed your mind. Why?"

She didn't turn around. "I came to protect my cousin."

"From me?" she asked in bewilderment. "I would never hurt him."

"See that you don't."

And with that, she was gone.

"Are you all right?"

Aeris gave Cloud a tremulous smile and nodded. "Now that you're here."

The feel of his hands stroking her hair helped to calm her fears. "She gave you a scare." She averted her eyes, but he slipped his fingers under her chin and nudged it upward, giving her little choice but to look at him. Blue eyes darkened as they roved over her face. "For that, I am sorry."

"No." She smiled more brightly at him. "You have no reason to be sorry. I am more embarrassed than anything that a mere child got the better of me so easily. I will have to be on my guard with her next time."

"With time, you will learn. You will not only know all of her tricks but the tricks of every fairy and will be able to anticipate and fend them off in your sleep."

"And how much time will I have to learn everything I need to know?" Aeris asked lightly, trying to inject some levity into the conversation.

His face remained solemn, his voice grave. "For you," he said. "I can give you all the centuries I have left. Will that be enough time, do you think?"

Her chest tightened but the pain was different from what she had felt earlier. Throat aching, she wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest.

* * *

><p><strong>~~~ooooo~~~<strong>

"Chin up, lad." The gruff voice jolted Zack from of his thoughts. "Why the fierce scowl? The workday is done and we get to go home to dinner with our families. This is the time of day that a man looks forward to most!"

He offered Ivan a weak smile. "Right."

"What were you boys talking about?"

"Work." A fine layer of sweat coated his skin despite the slight chill in the air. Zack deliberately wet his hands with water from his canteen and ran his fingers through his already damp hair, enjoying the feel of the cool water dripping down his neck and shoulders. "Tomorrow."

"Huddled about, talking in whispers, I was sure you were all sayin' I was driving you into an early grave."

Zack managed a chuckle. "That, too." He took one last swig from the canteen.

"How are Aeris and Tifa?"

He coughed, nearly choking as water went down the wrong pipe.

The barrel-chested farmer laughed heartily. "Don't be so surprised. You stay married to a woman long enough and her habits will rub off on you sooner or later. Letty likes to stick her nose into everybody's business but she's not just being nosy. She is genuinely concerned." The look on his face was almost sheepish. "Like she says, there ain't a whole lot of us out here so we have to look out for one another. We're all we've got." He slapped Zack on the back. "I know there's nothing to worry about with you taking care of them, but it don't hurt nothing to ask every now and then, right?"

It was high praise indeed, coming from someone whose idea of a compliment was to bestow more work upon his fellow man. But Zack couldn't help feeling ill at ease. "No, of course not," he said. "Have you... Is there something—?"

Ivan held up his hand, silencing Zack before he could make up his mind as to whether or not to tell the other farmer anything. "Lad, if you would care to hear the counsel of a foolish old man who might not have gotten to go to one of those fancy schools in the big towns, but has lived long enough to know when to indulge his wife's whims and when to heed the planet: If you have even a shadow of a doubt, I'd say go with your gut. Don't do something that you think could compromise your honor or who you are." He paused, lifted his face to the pinkening sky. "We wouldn't want to have a man-hunt in these parts. Or would it be a fairy-hunt, eh?"

"A...a what?" Zack was certain the farmer must have caught wind of something or other to have him talking about fairies of all things, a subject he had always made clear he thought was nonsense.

"Make no mistake." Ivan slid a glance at him out of the corner of his eye. "That's what it would be."

"But you said before… Letty..."

"Oh, that," Ivan said dismissively. "Don't listen to the grumblings of a man trying to get on his wife's good side. I reckon the land will never forgive us if we were to spill the blood of one of the fair folk. And out here of all places."

Zack surveyed the hills, troubled. To the north, the tops of the trees formed a dark mass that loomed over the nearby farms and dominated the skyline, visible even from this distance. The land wouldn't be the only one that would never forgive them, he thought, remembering Tifa's words from the previous morning.

"Makes you wonder, don't it, how they get that tall and what holds them up?"

Zack didn't have to wonder. He knew how the trees grew so tall and what kept them standing, just as the other man did. Something else Ivan had said had Zack swiveling his head back around to stare at him.

"What do you mean, out here of all places?" he asked abruptly, his voice more forceful than he had intended.

Ivan seemed unperturbed. "The woods are not the only place where the fey have been. Do you not see their markings on the land? The evidence they've left behind in the hills?" His voice was filled with awe as his eyes swept back over the fields as though he was seeing something altogether different from what Zack saw. "A long time ago, eons ago perhaps, they were here. They lived here."

Zack had little doubt that the farmer had been bewitched just as his housemate was. "What evidence?"

Russet eyebrows almost receded into the farmer's hairline. He nodded toward the hills and Zack followed his gaze back to the familiar features of the land. "They're everywhere."


End file.
